TAXPAYER TO PAY BAILEY’S €5M BILL
... and legal costs could be millions more if girlfriend loses too
TAXPAYERS face being landed with Ian Bailey’s estimated €5million legal bill arising from his failed wrongful arrest action against gardaí, i t has emerged.
The former journalist, 58, who remains a ‘person of interest’ in the Garda investigation into Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s 1996 murder, was yesterday ordered to pay the entire costs of the longest-running civil case before a jury in Irish legal history.
That multimillion-euro bill includes all costs associated with the 64- day High Court action plus disclosure of vast numbers of documents, including transcripts of secretly recorded Garda telephone calls.
Mr Bailey’s partner, Jules Thomas, is proceeding with her own case against
gardaí and the State, amid fears that if she too were to lose her case, her costs would be added to the massive bill.
Judge John Hedigan yesterday formally dismissed Mr Bailey’s case – which began last November and ran for five months – and awarded all costs against him. At the end of March, Judge Hedigan himself threw out five key planks of the case – including Mr Bailey’s two arrests in 1997 and 1998 – saying gardaí would have been ‘derelicting their duty’ not to have arrested him.
A jury then dismissed the final remaining issue, ruling that gardaí did not conspire with key witness Marie Farrell to ‘frame’ Mr Bailey for murder by creating false statements.
Yesterday, Judge Hedigan landed Mr Bailey with ‘an order for full costs of the proceedings in favour of the defendants [the State].’
State lawyers argued that Mr Bai- ley had ‘thrown the dice’ by taking the action and would now have to face the consequences. State counsel Luán Ó Braonáin SC told the court that Mr Bailey could not now say he didn’t want to ‘pay for taking the bet’.
Mr Bailey, who sat in court looking emotionally drained as the decision was given, declined to comment as he left the Four Courts. Last night, a source close to him said he was ‘reeling’ from the decision.
But legal experts said there was little chance he would ever be called on to pay a cent.
Mr Bailey is understood to have no income or assets to his name, while the West Cork house he lives in, The Prairie, is owned by Ms Thomas.
His only income in recent years appears to have been derived from selling produce, including pizzas or jam, at a West Cork farmer’s market.
A well-placed source told the Mail: ‘This guy’s got no money. He has no income. They are never going to pursue Bailey for the costs.
‘It would cost them more to pursue him and to get a fiver a week out of him than it would to sit on it and not seek to enforce it. It’s a meaningless order in terms of collection.’
‘The guy’s got no money’
Although the overall legal bill has yet to be calculated or ‘taxed’ by court officials, estimates have placed the figure as high as €5million.
Throughout the case, gardaí and the State were represented by five barristers including seasoned senior counsel Paul O’Higgins and Mr Ó Braonáin.
Mr Bailey’s Cork-based solicitor Frank Buttimer first took on the case in 2007 on a pro-bono basis, in the knowledge Mr Bailey wouldn’t have the money to pay big legal fees unless he won a large sum of damages.
Judge Hedigan allowed a 21- day stay on the costs order, to enable Mr Bailey to lodge an appeal against the verdict and the costs decision.
It is understood the Manchesterborn ex-news reporter ‘fully intends’ to lodge an appeal with the Court of Appeal before the 21- day deadline expires. That would place an automatic stay on the costs order until the appeal is heard.
In his bid to avoid the large bill yesterday, Mr Bailey’s counsel, Tom Creed SC, pleaded that 33-and-a-half days of the 64-day hearing amounted to time ‘wasted’ by the State’s eleventh-hour application to have most of Mr Bailey’s case declared statute-barred.
The State could have made such an application before a jury was sworn, Mr Creed said, instead of waiting until day 60.
But Judge Hedigan ruled: ‘It’s unfortunate the case took so long but the breadth and depth of allegations required all the evidence given and all cross examination that followed.’
Judge Hedigan said the defendants were entitled to deny ‘in open court’ Mr Bailey’s allegations that he was twice wrongly arrested in connection with the murder and that gardaí pursued him to the exclusion of all other suspects following the murder.
No date has yet been set for Ms Thomas’s civil suit. In the High Court on June 22, the State will apply to stop her case in its tracks on the basis it too is statute-barred.
She l odged her civil action for wrongful arrest in 2007, at the same time as Mr Bailey’s.
They were both initially arrested on February 10, 1997. Ms Thomas was arrested again in September 2000. On both occasions, she was arrested on suspicion of ‘covering’ for Mr Bailey.
During a June 1997 phone tape played to a High Court jury in December, one detective remarked that the case against Mr Bailey was ‘50-50’ unless they could ‘break’ Ms Thomas. He said: ‘We need her broken and we need to have it because if you stand back from it… it is 50-50.’
Ms Thomas has also claimed that during a car journey to Bandon, gardaí ‘laid straight into me that Ian had done it’. Gardaí deny the claims.