The owner of a luxury holiday business will launch a court appeal today to compel a US executive to pay up the last $70,000 (€52,569) allegedly owing from his lavish $610,000 family reunion in Ireland.
Robert Greifeld, the chief executive of the Nasdaq stock exchange, brought 16 adults and seven children to stay for a week at Luttrellstown Castle in Dublin. He claims that he was overcharged by $70,000 and is refusing the pay the money for the trip, which included 32 actors in medieval dress, banquets of wild boar, helicopter rides, a marquee for Irish dancing and lessons in falconry, archery and jousting.
The August 2004 trip also included four butlers who led guests to horse-drawn carriages, goose hunts and Dublin masseuses on hand to attend for guests.
However, Tours of Enchantment creator Gregory Patrick said yesterday that he had three "very solid" grounds for appeals and that his lawyer will be vigorously fighting for the outstanding $70,000.
After a lower court dismissed Mr Patrick's case, he said he believed a higher court in Elizabeth, New Jersey would see that Tours of Enchantment had kept exact records of the trip, even down to the €62 spent on glasses frames for one of the guests, a 15-year-old boy. Mr Patrick said he employed a courier for two days to find the right type of frames in Dublin city but the effort of finding the glasses was not properly seen in the itemised bill. Other expenses included €28,000 for Mr Greifeld snr's transatlantic voyage on the Queen Mary IIand even €100 for a leprechaun costume for an actor performing at the castle.
Speaking at his Houston, Texas headquarters yesterday, Mr Patrick said the case was a "David versus Goliath struggle" to win the money from Mr Greifeld (48), who earns $4 million a year as Nasdaq chief. Most of the money was already placed on Tours of Enchantment credit cards and has been paid off but Mr Patrick is holding souvenir DVD tapes of the trip until Mr Greifeld pays up in full.
"With someone that prestigious, both in terms of the size of the contract and his status as one of America's most powerful businessmen, we would do everything in our power to accommodate him but we can only go so far," he said.
Mr Greifeld's firm had initially hoped that the case could go to mediation and that a Dublin chartered accountant could be called in to look over the figures and come up with an agreed sum.
However, with the case heading for the appeal court today, costs are mounting on both sides. Mr Patrick has spent at least $50,000 on the case while Mr Greifeld is estimated to have spent over $100,000.