Stubbs Gazette Debt Defaulters

In any business gazette the information would be scant – names of Plaintiff & Defendant, amount of judgement & costs. Stubbs has been there for about 150 years and records registered judgements (see below), receiverships, liquidations and bankruptcies. AFAIK the older editions are not available electronically. However UK bankruptcy proceedings are available in the National Archives at Kew and searchable in the London Gazette http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/. (A sort-of Irish equivalent is ‘Iris Oifigiuil’ which has receiverships, liquidations, etc., http://www.irisoifigiuil.ie/)

Following the legal debt collection process, a judgement is obtained in the appropriate court (District, Circuit or High, depending on the amount.) The entity obtaining judgement could withhold ‘registering’ the judgement (at which time it would become very public) as a form of further leverage on the defaulter – i.e. ‘Pay us or we will register the judgement.’ Registration has serious implications for any company/individual as that is the subject of the judgement, so a debtor might agree to pay X per month on the understanding that the judgement would not be registered.

There have been various types of ‘Gazette’ – in Ireland for e.g. Dun & Bradstreet, Irish Trade Protection Association (bought out about 20 yrs ago by Experian) etc., all had their own publications. In addition to judgements and insolvencies, some of them also include the registration of mortgages and charges, and the formation of new companies. All date back decades and more; all paper versions have been surpassed by electronic searchable databases.

Coolnabacky– AFAIK Lexis Nexis is the biggest recorder of judgements in the USA of those who record such things; every time someone takes a credit report on a prospective business partner/borrower, the credit reporting company will do a judgement search as part of its overall report.