RBS fraudster’s bizarre court ‘pantomime’
Walsh faces new accusation over MoS email in £200m bank compensation battle
A FRAUDSTER has been accused of presenting a doctored email from The Mail on Sunday as evidence in court as he attempts to claim a share of millions of pounds owed to RBS investors.
Gerard Walsh, 61, is fighting for £ 3. 75 million of a £ 200 million compensation settlement won by investors who signed up to an action group that he set up.
The group sued RBS over allegations that its members were duped into buying the bank’s shares.
In what the judge called a ‘pantomime’ court hearing last week, Walsh supplied a document that he claimed was an email he had received from a Mail on Sunday reporter.
But the validity of the email was called into question by opposing lawyers and The Mail on Sunday’s records appear to show the wording of the message had been edited.
If it transpires that Walsh was responsible for altering a document presented to a judge, he could face a criminal investigation and be found in contempt of court.
In court, one lawyer said of the discrepancy: ‘On the face of it [this] is a very serious contempt.’
It is the latest twist in a bizarre legal battle surrounding the RBoS Shareholders Action Group, which was co-founded by Walsh after a doomed 2008 RBS rights issue.
The 7,000 investors who signed up to the group won a settlement, thought to be worth £200 million, from the bank in June 2017.
But this was after Walsh and the action group had been ousted as managers of the claim by Manx Capital, an investment vehicle of tycoon Trevor Hemmings. He was among investors who signed up to the group but became unhappy with the way the claim was managed.
Manx and Hemmings on one side, and Walsh and the action group on the other, have been involved in a furious legal spat since the settlement was struck. Most of the money is yet to be paid out to investors.
One major dispute is over £3.75 million that Walsh feels he is owed as a bonus payment for the settlement being won.
A court was told this year that Walsh – who was labelled a fraudster in the Jersey Royal Court in 2014 in a separate case, and ‘guilty of fraudulent misrepresentation’ by the High Court of Ireland in 1997 – had presented himself as a volunteer while charging £80 an hour for his consultancy work.
The battle came to a head last week when Walsh appeared in London’s High Court to answer questions about his work for the group. Manx had obtained a court order to access a series of Walsh’s emails f al l i ng under s pecific search terms.
The court heard that more than 19,000 of his electronic communications fall under these terms, but Walsh decided 15,991 are not relevant and should not be disclosed.
Mr Justice Hildyard last week ruled all of the emails should be handed over to Signature Litigation – the law firm instructed by Manx.
This was only after a bizarre day in court, much of which was spent debating the existence of an email which Walsh said he had received from this newspaper.
Barra McGrory QC, representing the RBoS Shareholders Action Group, tried to argue that an independent lawyer or firm should be drafted in to handle Walsh’s emails.
McGrory relied on evidence given in court by Walsh who claimed he had received an email from The Mail on Sunday in which a reporter had revealed he was aware of email correspondence between Walsh and Nigel Masters, a director of the RBoS Shareholders Action Group.
It was alleged that this proved Signature Litigation had been leaking confidential information to this newspaper.
When questions were raised about the validity of the email, lawyers for the RBoS Shareholders Action Group were asked to supply a copy of the document to the court. They then printed an email with different wording, which made no reference to correspondence between Walsh and Masters.
Challenged again, lawyers then supplied a second email – sent the next day – which was almost identical to the first but included the quote Walsh had supplied to the court.
The Mail on Sunday’s records show that two emails were sent to Walsh, on October 5 and 6.
The first put a series of allegations to Walsh, and the second forwarded this same memo the next day to try to speed up a response. Neither email contained the wording which Walsh and the RBoS Shareholders Action Group relied upon in court.
Mr Justice Hildyard demanded access to the original emails on Thursday.
During the hearing, as Walsh and representatives rushed in and out of the hearing room to print off the different emails, the judge said: ‘It is t he pantomime season, but normally [it] doesn’t venture into this court.’
Ian Higgins, for Manx, said: ‘It adds little to this for me to say how serious a matter this is...
‘On the face of it, a false statement in an affidavit [is] an attempt to mislead the court... On the face of it, [this] is a very serious contempt.’
The judge said: ‘There are two rival [emails] which suggests that one of them is not an unamended email and one of them is. There CLAIM: Gerard Walsh leaving court last week doesn’t appear to be any other explanation, which is odd.’
McGrory told the court there was a ‘ deep personal rift’ between Walsh and lawyers at Signature Litigation, hence his unease about handing over emails.
He said Walsh had complied with t he order t o produce relevant emails, adding: ‘In the course of this process, he identified this category of emails, albeit a very large category, which he considered to be private and not to do with the business of the RBoS action group.’
The case continues next month. The RBoS Shareholders Action Group and Walsh did not respond to requests for comment.