The Trib (17 page)

On Tuesday, Prince's lawyer told Judge Peter Kelly that the man himself wouldn't be making the trip. Neither would his right-hand woman, Ruth Arzate. Both had furnished witness statements, but that's a bit like lip synching on
Top Of The Pops
– it doesn't work in front of a live audience.

The lawyer Paul Sreenan told the judge about the no show.

‘Well, what would Lady Bracknell say?' the judge replied. Nobody pointed out to the judge that the case was entering territory more familiar with Lady Gaga than Lady Bracknell and the bould Oscar.

The proposed gig saw the light of day in December 2007. Desmond contacted WMEE's Tony Goldring. Only the music business could produce a man by the name of Goldring. They checked it out with the little guy. A European tour was sketched. Offers came in for gigs at seven venues, including Croke Park, earmarked for 16 June. Prince was offered $3 million for the Dublin gig. In total, if he accepted the seven offers from across Europe, he was in line for $22 million for a week's work.

Of course, there were issues. The little guy isn't like you and me. He is an artist, subject to the whims of his muse and the moods of what was described in court as his ‘gift'. Communication with Prince is through Ruth Arzate, who acts as an interpreter of his thoughts, as well as his interior decorator and personal assistant. Ruth is a busy woman.

‘Ruth spent a lot of time interpreting Prince for us,' WMEE's Keith Sarkisian told the court on Wednesday. Sarkisian had flown in from LA. He is described as a ‘responsible agent'. This really means he's the link man with the artist. But he was not allowed to go straight to Prince. He had to communicate via Ruth the interpreter.

Things got moving. In January, Ruth interpreted Prince and issued an email to Sarkisian, ‘Dublin looks nice.' More emails followed and by late February the little guy confirmed he was ready to big it up in Croker.

WMEE got cracking. ‘Are they cool?' Sarkisian wrote in one email, referring to another party involved in the promotion.

‘What did you mean by, “Are they cool?”' lawyer Grainne Clohessy asked him.

‘Are they good to go, up to date,' he replied.

‘As opposed to are they trendy?' the lawyer inquired. Really, somebody needs to get down to the Four Courts and introduce these people to the Californian vernacular that has swept the rest of the world like a pandemic virus. Is we cool on that point?

Later, Sarkisian mentioned that he ‘continued to reach out to them (concert buyers)'.

‘What do you mean by ‘reach out'?' the judge asked. Cue Diana Ross entering from the back of the courtroom, all big hair, trailing a sequinned dress and singing into a Big Mama microphone. ‘Reach out and touch, somebody's hand, make this world a better place, if you can.'

Back on planet earth, the psyche of Prince was further dissected. Despite confirming for Dublin, he didn't confirm for any of the other European gigs. Everybody was trying to interpret what he wanted. In one email sent to Sarkisian, Prince was referred to as ‘an incredible client'.

The judge wanted that characterisation interpreted.

‘Is that that he was not to be believed or he was a good client?'

‘Oh, it's that he was a very good client,' Sarkisian replied. ‘He (the writer) was talking about his gift, as I understand it.'

On 12 March, Sarkisian was invited to Prince's house for dinner. ‘Dinners with Prince are interesting, usually filled with lots of discussion about worldly issues,' he told the court.

‘He was very frustrated with album sales. He was looking to do something to break into markets he hadn't been in in a long time.' Further correspondence through his interpreter Ruth elicited that the little guy didn't want any complimentary tickets given out for the Dublin gig. He wanted ‘everybody to pay seriously'.

Through the evidence, a picture began to emerge of an ageing artist, well past the creative peak for contemporary performers, whose only solace was hoovering up large wads of cash, if only he could be bothered to get up off his rear end.

March turned into April. Desmond was putting Goldring under pressure for specifics from Prince. Once again, Sarkisian went to dine at the little guy's house. This time there were three others present, including Prince's female friend, who was some class of a singer herself. Sarkisian didn't want to discuss business in front of strangers, so the conversation presumably dwelt on worldly issues.

At one stage, Prince left the room. Soon after, his security man ‘Raul' came in and told poor Keith that dinner was over and it was time to leave. Sarkisian was asked in the witness box why he didn't tell Prince to come back and eat his dinner.

‘You can't tell Prince to come back to dinner, at least I can't.'

By June, everything was looking shaky. All eyes were on Prince's gaff, hoping for some smoke signals or the belt of a snare drum; any kind of interpretation at all that he might suggest he was willing to fulfil his commitment to gig in Dublin. Sarkisian and his boss Marc Geiger finally got an audience with him to explain that cancelling would be a serious problem. They outlined that Denis was over in Dublin getting his knickers in a twist.

‘Tell the cat to chill, I'll figure it out,' Prince told them. The cat in question was smiling in the public gallery when that line was revealed. His €1.7 million in cream was looking more promising.

By Thursday afternoon, Judge Peter Kelly was clicking into the groove. At a break in Geiger's evidence, the judge remarked: ‘There's no hurry, the rest of us are chilling.' Check out the dude who'd come a long way from Lady Bracknell.

Later, when reference was made once again to the function of Ruth the interpreter, the judge offered a description of Prince's assistant. ‘His representative on earth, you might say,' Judge Kelly opined. Now we were sucking diesel.

On Friday morning, the case settled. By then, the lawyers were costing a king's ransom, even by Prince's extravagant standards. Judge Kelly asked the little guy's lawyer Sreenen whether he had confirmation of the settlement from his client.

‘Does it mean the same in Princespeak as it does in English?' the judge asked.

Outside, Desmond expressed himself very pleased with the result.

‘The cat is very chilled,' he said.

Ryanair's Michael O'Leary met his match with Judge Peter Kelly in the High Court. There was always going to be one winner, and it wasn't the chief of spin.

28 March 2010

T
hey got off to a bad start. Michael O'Leary bounded up into the witness box and took the Bible in his right hand. His left remained rooted in a pocket. ‘Will you take your hand out of your pocket while the oath is being administered, please?' Judge Peter Kelly asked. O'Leary complied, but it was obvious from the off that these two boys would never be sharing a few pints together.

O'Leary was appearing in the High Court on Friday afternoon on foot of a request from the judge. On Wednesday, Kelly had been notified that an important letter sent by transport minister Noel Dempsey to O'Leary was not included in affidavits sworn by two solicitors on behalf of Ryanair. The airline, a frequent flyer to the courts, is involved in litigation over O'Leary's perennial bugbear – passenger charges at Dublin airport.

Judge Kelly felt he had been misled by the omission of the letter in question. He suggested that O'Leary hightail it down to the courts by 2 p.m. on Friday. Cometh the hour, there was the man, dolled up to the nines by his standards, in flannel trousers and smart jacket.

The attraction of a court appearance by O'Leary is obvious. When lawyers or a judge are performing their functions properly, facts are parsed and analysed in a cold, clinical manner in court. Spin is squeezed out. Spin is O'Leary's forte. He is by any standards a master communicator.

Just last month, he performed Herculean feats by spinning the construction of a Ryanair hangar in Scotland into a scenario whereby Mary Coughlan, Aer Lingus and the Dublin Airport Authority were ineptly allowing jobs to flee the country. Different class, as our footballing brethren might say.

Peter Kelly is no slouch at his own business. He presides over the Commercial Court. For the last eighteen months, he has been sifting through the embers of the Celtic bonfire. All manner of wide-boys, shysters, fools, not to mention lawyers and accountants displaying the ethics of vultures, have been parading through his court. Through his public comments and his work in general he has delivered a devastating critique of what transpired during the madness. He is a rare species at the current time, somebody who draws his authority from the performance of his duty rather than the status of the office he occupies.

O'Leary told the court he was there on foot of the court report in the
Irish Times
the previous day (Thursday). The judge's suggestion on Wednesday that he was misleading the court obviously didn't prompt any underling to contact him that evening. He just read about it in the papers.

‘I'd like to add my own apology,' he said, referring to the words of sorrow expressed by the two solicitors who swore the offending affidavits.

‘How is it that both of them were unaware of the letter?' the judge wanted to know.

‘I did not give them the letter. They didn't check the file,' O'Leary said. He launched into one of his standard soliloquies about the crazy bureaucracy Ryanair has to endure from the assorted arms of the State. He said that if he had seen the affidavit he would have amended it in relation to a sentence which implied there had been no communication on the relevant matter with Dempsey, but he wouldn't have included the letter anyway because it wasn't relevant.

Four times the judge asked him whether he would have included the letter.

‘Was I going to be told in affidavit form what the minister had decided?' Kelly asked, with growing exasperation. O'Leary's lawyer got up and tried to explain where his client was coming from.

‘You're fencing with me now,' the judge said. ‘He's the chief executive of Ryanair. He calls the shots.'

At one stage, the judge told O'Leary, ‘You're contradicting yourself.'

‘I'm not contradicting myself,' the spinmeister replied.

O'Leary and his company have form with the judiciary. In 2005, Judge Barry White threatened to jail the Ryanair chief if he didn't comply with a court order to reinstate a pilot to a roster. O'Leary drew back at the last moment.

In 2006 Judge Thomas Smyth said that for only the second time in his career, he felt compelled to rule that witnesses had given false evidence under oath, referring to two Ryanair executives.

Despite the rarity of the ruling, no charges of perjury were ever forthcoming from the DPP. Neither were the executives sanctioned by Ryanair. The ruling didn't affect the bottom line, and beyond that, who, as Mickser himself might put it, gives a fiddlers?

On Friday, the fireworks exploded when a lawyer for the Dublin Airport Authority produced a separate letter that O'Leary had written to Dempsey beseeching the minister to organise a review of the airport charges.

‘Both Judge Kelly and the DAA lawyers were critical of your delay in appointing an appeals panel,' O'Leary wrote. Kelly hit the roof. He had made no criticism of Dempsey.

‘You are representing to the minister something you say I said. Where did I say that?' he wanted to know. O'Leary made what the judge later referred to as a ‘pathetic' attempt to justify the comment. By then, the spinmeister was transmogrifying into the squirmmeister.

O'Leary said the offending passage was a misquote.

‘It is not a misquote, it is a lie,' the judge said.

The DAA lawyer Cian Ferriter produced a press release Ryanair had issued calling the minister ‘dozy Dempsey' and ‘doolittle Dempsey'. This was two days after Dempsey had written a letter to O'Leary undertaking to set up the review panel.

Ferriter put it to the witness. ‘There is a pattern of mislead. You misled the court, the Commission for Aviation Regulation, the minister, the public and [Ryanair's] solicitors ... it shows a disregard for the truth.' O'Leary rejected the multiple misleadings.

Judge Kelly was more interested in how he had been misrepresented. O'Leary said he would apologise. ‘It's not just enough that he apologises to the court,' the judge replied.

O'Leary's lawyer took the hint. ‘Do you wish to apologise to the minister?'

‘Yes I do.'

The judge was taking no chances. ‘Hadn't he better write to the minister and tell him that I didn't criticise him ... I want to see the letter before it is sent.'

At the end of the proceedings, Judge Kelly told O'Leary he was lucky the matter wasn't being treated as contempt. He put back the substantive issue, allowing the DAA and others time to apply to strike out the action on the basis of Ryanair's conduct. He wants to see O'Leary's letter of apology to Dempsey by Tuesday.