Mullins launches legal action over Be My Royal disqualification
The Jockey Club’s disciplinary panel imposed the disqualification after the horse failed a post-race drugs test for morphine. A contaminated food supply was found to be the source. Willie Mullins, who was trainer at the time, was not fined but was ordered to pay £5,000 in legal costs. Be My Royal was retired shortly after the Newbury race triumph when he suffered a serious injury in his next race.
Yesterday at the High Court in London Mr Mullins applied to Mr Justice Stanley Burnton for judicial review of an appeal board’s decision upholding the disqualification.
His legal team’s first hurdle is to show that the board’s decision raises public law issues and is susceptible to judicial review.
Tim Kerr QC, for Mr Mullins, said: “We seek to put right what we say is a serious injustice by establishing that Be My Royal was the true and lawful winner of the 2002 Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup.”
Mr Mullins was simply seeking a declaration to that effect and had abandoned his “quest to upset the prize money arrangements”.
Mr Kerr said: “That does not mean the opprobrium and slur on Mr Mullins’s honour arising from an unjust conviction for a doping offence are not of the highest importance.”
He said many in the sporting world “would regard being robbed of the achievement of winning the Hennessy Gold Cup as far worse than a breach of any human right - short, perhaps of the right to life”.
Be My Royal’s disqualification meant the original second Gingembre, trained by Lavinia Taylor, was promoted to first.
The complaint at the centre of Mr Mullins’s case was that the appeal board wrongly heard the appeal on the basis that any trace of morphine, however small, was a breach of the rules.
In fact the Jockey Club had earlier adopted a threshold of 50 nanograms per millilitre of post-race urine, below which the presence of the drug was not reportable. At that level of concentration, the drug was to be regarded as irrelevant because it could not affect performance.
Mr Mullins did not hear of the existence of the reporting threshold until November 2003.
The trainer’s laboratory expert estimated a concentration of 33 nanograms in this case. The Jockey Club’s expert put it much higher, but no attempt was made to prove the point on the basis that even a small amount was against the rules.
The appeal board’s decision was, in the circumstances, “arbitrary and capricious” and the horse’s disqualification unlawful, said Mr Kerr. The Jockey Club is disputing the claim.
Mr Kerr said if the court ruled that the decision could not be challenged by way of the public law procedure of judicial review, he would ask for the case to be transferred to the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court to be heard as a private law action. The hearing is expected to last two days.
