ENGLISH CHAMPIONSHIP:THE LEEDS United owner, Ken Bates, rejected accusations he used his column in the matchday programme to pursue a personal "vendetta" against the club's former director Melvyn Levi and Levi's wife, Carole.
The Levis are suing Bates personally, Leeds United and the club-owned Yorkshire Radio station, claiming several of Bates’s programme articles and two Yorkshire Radio broadcasts amounted to harassment of the couple.
Bates, giving evidence at Leeds county court, said he continued to write about Levi because of a legal dispute, dating back to 2005, in which he claims a company connected to Levi owes the club €233,000, which Levi rejects.
Levi’s barrister, Simon Myerson QC, accused Bates of wanting to make the Levis’ lives “miserable” and said: “This is the way you conduct a legal dispute. It is not good enough for it to be in the courts. You can write about it in the programme because you own the club.”
Bates, who accepted the Levis were “upset”, replied: “I continue to report in the programme on the events surrounding the disappearance of €233,000.”
Key to the case is an episode over Christmas 2010, after a representative instructed by Bates to serve a writ on Levi was told by Carole Levi that her husband was away and not back until the new year.
Four days later, before and at half-time during Leeds’s match against Leicester City on Boxing Day, Yorkshire Radio broadcast an appeal to listeners to contact the club if they knew of Levi’s whereabouts.
In irritable exchanges with Myerson, who represented Levi in his successful libel claim against Bates in 2009 over the Leeds owner’s programme articles, Bates said Myerson had never worked “in the real world”.
Myerson said pointedly: “In the real world, people can buy football clubs, have their own column in the programme, and write whatever you like about people you don’t like.”
Bates retorted: “You are being pathetic now.”
Asked if he has complete control over what he writes in his programme articles, Bates said his wife, Susannah, sees them but otherwise nobody else exercises guidance unless the programme editor, Leeds’s head of communications Paul Dews, “has any issues”.
Earlier, the club’s chief executive, Shaun Harvey, said he does scrutinise the articles and “by definition” takes responsibility for their contents, to ensure they are “informative and balanced”.
Myerson asked Harvey, referring to the club’s process of printing Bates’s articles in the matchday programme: “Is anybody exercising control or is an elderly man being indulged in his vendettas?”
Harvey denied that Bates was being indulged in vendettas. The case continues.
Guardian Service
