Accountant Alan Hynes and his wife Noreen’s are now “impecunious” and largely reliant on a stipend Mrs Hynes receives from the Chartered Accountants Ireland benevolent society, Mr Hynes’s barrister, Alan Cormack, told a tribunal.
He was speaking in the wake of the institute’s disciplinary tribunal making the most serious findings available to it against Mr Hynes and as it moved to address the issue of sanctions and costs.
Mr Cormack said his client had suffered a “devastating loss” with the collapse of his various business interests and was now trying to reconstruct his life. Mr Hynes, he said, did not have a licence to practice as an accountant but was doing work for the Wexford company, Tuskar Property Holdings Ltd. His income from this was “very meagre”.
Asked by tribunal chairman JP McDowell if the services Mr Hynes was providing included investment advice, Mr Cormack did not respond. “He is providing normal accountancy advice.” He said he was not involved in putting property syndicates together.
Mr Cormack said he did not have a statement of means for his client but that he had been told the tribunal was welcome to get a copy of the statement that had been submitted to the institute’s benevolence society in early 2014. The society had sanctioned the maximum stipend to Mrs Hynes, Mr Cormack said. Mrs Hynes, who is not employed, is not a member of the institute. “In short they are impecunious,” he said.
The couple were in a position of “substantial negative equity” and had two children below the age of 12 years. There were a number of judgment orders against them, some of which were registered against the family home. The couple are still living in the property. They were acting as lay litigants in some, though not all, of the legal cases they were involved in.
Mr Hynes, the tribunal was told, was in no position to pay any fines that might be levied against him. He had learned “a very heavy lesson” as a result of all that had happened, Mr Cormack said, and is “extremely sorry for all that has occurred.”
Asked why his client wasn’t present, Mr Cormack said Mr Hynes found it very difficult to be before the tribunal. He said his client had become over-stretched during the boom years and there was a sense that he was “creature of his time.” He accepted that the institute had to retain public confidence in accountants but excluding Mr Hynes from the institute would be “disproportionate”.
Asked about the protection of the public in the future, Mr Cormack suggested that his client “might need to be very closely monitored, or perhaps mentored, by the institute.”
Brian Farren, for the institute’s complaints committee, said Mr Hynes was not present and the submissions of his counsel in relation to his means were not evidence. It was only today that he had first heard of Mrs Hynes having dealings with the benevolence society. It was often difficult, when Mr Hynes was giving evidence, to find out exactly what was going on. “I would urge the tribunal to have regard to its own personal observations as to what went on before it.”
