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A lawyer for Rory McIlroy’s father Gerry has said it was “just preposterous” to suggest there was a conspiracy to end the golfer’s agreement with his sports management company in April last year.
Rossa Fanning said if it was a conspiracy, which is denied, then it was “the worst conspiracy in the world”.
This was because it would have happened around the time of one of the most important events in the golfing calendar, the Masters.
It was also the month after Rory McIlroy had signed an amendment to his December 2011 representation agreement with Dublin-based Horizon Sports Management, counsel said.
Mr Fanning was speaking on the third day of a High Court application by Horizon and two other companies for better disclosure of documents and inspection of mobile phones of Rory McIlroy, his father and two other employees of Rory McIlroy Inc, the golfer’s own management company.
The hearing is in advance of a full trial of Mr McIlroy’s case against the Horizon defendants in which he claims he is entitled to rescind the agreement as it was improvident and signed it without proper advice.
Horizon, and two companies, Gurteen Ltd and Canovan Management Services, have counter claimed for damages.
The defendants say they have not been given all the available data by the McIlroy side, and by people close to him, in order to prepare their case despite a previous court order that disclosure be made.
Mr McIlroy’s father, Gerry, has not properly explained why data on his mobile phone was wiped in circumstances where he was in close contact with his son at the time the agreement was repudiated, counsel said. Information required for the court case may have been contained on that phone.
All that Gerry McIlroy had provided for the Horizon discovery of documents process was five emails, over which legal privilege was claimed on three of them, said Maurice Collins, for the defendants.
Gerry McIlroy had maintained his main form of communication was conversations in person or by phone and he only used messaging infrequently.
Mr Fanning, for the McIlroys, said there was a lack of reality to what was being sought and no substance to the claim there was a co-ordinated deletion of data from phones of the golfer, his father and others.
All parties had explained what had happened with their phones, he said.
“The conspiracy theory is just preposterous”, he said.
Mr Fanning said to suggest there was some sort of conspiracy was “an elaborate smokescreen designed to blacken the names of a number of people”.
An application by Rory McIlroy’s side for the defendants to quantify the amount of damages they are seeking in their counter-claim is also being heard by the court today.
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