The high court has rejected an application to amend a doleance claim relating to a search and seizure warrant.

In September 2016, the US Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control launched an investigation into the affairs of PacNet Services Ltd, an international payments processing and money services business based in Vancouver, Canada.

The OFAC designated the PacNet Group as a ’significant transnational criminal organisation’ which had helped ’scammers get their hands on millions of dollars from mainly elderly victims’.

PacNet categorically denied the allegations - and mounted a vigorous defence.

And a year later, the OFAC acted to remove from its blacklist the names of Paul Davis who was general counsel for PacNet and director of some of its subsidiaries.

However, a money laundering investigation remains ’active and ongoing’ in the Isle of Man, the high court heard.

Detective Constable Emma McGreevy said that no one has yet been charged with an offence in the island, but she believed criminal charges are likely to be preferred once the investigation is complete.

Accordingly, she applied for warrants to search five premises, all but one being various residential addresses in the island.

Paul Davis and a series of others brought a doleance claim in December 2018 against the island’s Attorney General, seeking to quash the search and seizure warrants granted by Deemster Kainth in May last year and obtain an order for the return of the items seized.

Flawed

They also sought an injuction against Attorney General John Quinn prohibiting from passing any information obtained as a result of the execution of the warrants to third parties.

There is also a claim for damages, to be assessed.

But in March this year, the claimants applied to amend their claim to add DC McGreevy as a second defendant.

But Deemster Andrew Corlett dismissed the application to amend the doleance claim, concluding that it was ’fatally flawed’.

The decision of the Court of General Gaol Delivery to issue the warrants was no challenged.

And Deemster Corlett said that ’any attempt to challenge DC McGreevy’s own acts or omissions amount in my view to an impermissible collateral attack on Deemster Kainth’s decision to grant the warrants’.

Mr Davis told the Examiner in October 2017 how being blacklisted by OFAC had been ’like a nuclear bomb going off’.

Blacklist

He said at the time: ’Our world-class global business was utterly destroyed.

’It was a unilateral declaration with no warning, no charge, no arrest.

’They simply announced "you are on the list" and our world fell apart.

’We were a legitimate employer operating in 50 countries.’