About a month ago (April 5) Declan Ganley, above, who is not in the CIA, was reportedly (on the Business and Finance website) setting up a Swiss bank with Consantin Gurdiev and David McDreamy as directors. The bank would look after Irish depositors who no longer felt their money was safe in Irish banks.
A day later we got this:
From:
Philip Lee Solicitors
Message:
Our Client: Declan Ganley
Dear Sirs,
It has come to our client’s attention that on your website, you have
published an article relating to our client entitled “This Is No Way
To Run A Bank”.
The article was uploaded at approximately 6.16pm yesterday.
It is important that you are made aware that this article is
substantially inaccurate. It contains a large number of serious
errors. Specifically:-
(1) Our client is not involved in the establishment of a new bank;
(2) Your article names a number of third-party individuals who are
neither directors nor shareholders of a financial institution of any
kind that is associated with our client; and
(3) The press release quoted from extensively is unknown to our
client. As far as he is concerned, it is a complete fabrication.
Our client is in the process of carrying out an urgent investigation
into the provenance of this material.
The purpose of the present letter is, in good faith, to afford you an
opportunity to immediately remove this article from your website. You
might note that we have already written to Business & Finance, an
apparent source for the article on your website, in identical terms.
The article has been removed from their website.
Our client has no wish to enter into unnecessary litigation, or to
apply for an injunction. Both possibilities can be immediately
precluded if you remove the article. If this is not done, our client
will have no option, however reluctantly, but to immediately move to
the alternatives (including an immediate application to the High
Court) available to him.
Yours faithfully
PHILIP LEE SOLICITORS
As it seemed somewhat unequivocal (and because Ewok had begun softly whimpering) we chose to ‘redact’ the article in a cowardly but ‘satirical’ manner.
Like so:
Not our finest 15 minutes but, you know, we all partied.
Then, late last night, Bodger spotted this:
And not for the first time did we muse to ourselves: what must it be like to be a lawyer for a person like Ganley? To have survived Gonzaga/Loreto or wherever, gone through law school, toiled for years setting up a practice/becoming a partner, only to end up writing comically scary letters on behalf of an angry rich dude whose motives are unclear even to himself?
And then we thought: the money must be fantastic.
Ganley Firm To Help Clients Put Money In Swiss Banks (Irish Independent)
(Photocall Ireland)
.