Judge slates Jordan as unreliable witness

FORMULA 1 boss Eddie Jordan’s €212 million lawsuit in which he had accused Vodafone of reneging on a sponsorship agreement was yesterday described as “without foundation and false” by a High Court judge.

He also said the Jordan was a “wholly unsatisfactory witness.”

Jordan abandoned the claim last Thursday, two days after the conclusion of a lengthy trial and only hours before Mr Justice Langley’s ruling in the dispute was to have been made public the following afternoon.

The judge, sitting in London, rejected an application on Friday on behalf of Jordan for his judgment to remain confidential in the light of the decision to discontinue the action and an offer to pay Vodafone’s legal costs at the higher “indemnity” rate.

He said Jordan had chosen to make serious allegations about a public company and question the veracity and motivation of one or possibly two of its senior officers in a public arena.

Mr Justice Langley said the case had involved “conflicting and irreconcilable accounts of events” decisive of the issues he had to decide.

Referring to Jordan and Ian Phillips, Jordan’s director of business affairs, the judge said: “I regret to say that I found both Mr Jordan and Mr Phillips to be wholly unsatisfactory witnesses. As will appear, their evidence was in many instances in stark conflict with and, indeed, belied by the documents, often documents of their own making

“On occasions even Mr Jordan was unable to offer an explanation and was reduced to embarrassed silence by the exposure of blatant inaccuracies in what he was saying.

“The evidence they gave and the claim Jordan makes became more and more contrived and unsustainable.”

Referring to the March 22, 2001 “You’ve got the deal” telephone conversation, the judge said: “I have no doubt that Mr Haines’ (David Haines, global branding director of Vodafone) account is to be preferred to that of Mr Jordan and Mr Phillips.

“I am sure Mr Jordan was pushing hard. I do not doubt he thought he was on a winner. He may even have indulged in wishful thinking, but not even the rudiments of a ‘deal’ in the sense Jordan seeks to use the word had been established at the time.”

The result of the action had hung on the meaning of four words: “You’ve got the deal.”

At the start of the hotly disputed Commercial Court hearing in June the judge was told that, according to Jordan, the words were spoken on the phone to Mr Jordan by Mr Haines of the telecommunications giant, on March 22, 2001.

Jordan had sued for a total of about €212m damages, claiming Vodafone broke the agreement when it was lured away by Ferrari.