Businessman Denis O’Brien's defamation action ‘disgraceful’, says Michael McDowell via IrishTimes
Denis O’Brien’s defamation case against the Sunday Business Post “deserves to be thrown out on its backside”, a High Court jury has been told.
On Tuesday, Mr McDowell said Mr O’Brien’s case is “disgraceful”, “wholly unfounded, manufactured, false, irresponsible and malicious”. The PwC report put Mr O’Brien as number 10 of the 22 biggest borrowers from Irish banks in 2008, he said. No-one in 2015 who construed the articles as meaning Mr O’Brien faced financial pressure in 2008 could, when also told he had repaid all his loans, was the best customer of Irish banks and a successful mobile phone and media entrepreneur, consider that defamatory, he said.
Mr O’Brien had described a number of situations, including his purchase of a two-storey premises in Donnybrook with a view to building a 26-storey block of apartments, he said. If you knock down a two-storey building and propose to build 26 storeys, whether keeping that for yourself or not, that’s a developer but Mr O’Brien “brazenly denied that”, he said.
Counsel said a lot had been said about this case being “vicious” and there was an attempt on behalf of the SBP to “turn it on its head” by making the SBP the “victims”. Mr O’Brien was not out to personalise the case or destroy anyone and he had sued the SBP and not the journalists involved in the articles although he would have been entitled to do so, he said.
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