Open Letter to the Members of Athlone Town (Association) Football Club

 Dear Athlone Town members,

                                                we now appear to be nearing the end of our long-running court saga and a toxic decade of relations with your club. I am confident of success, but my confidence is irrelevant to your interests. It is also extremely unreliable, as I have a very poor record in predicting this stuff. I initially thought that a blatant land grab by people who brought an organised crime racket to Athlone would get short shrift in a court of law. And here we are four years later, they are still in the game. 

Now to your interests: I will deal first with the financial implications of the two possible outcomes. If we lose (i.e. Garda Dully's case stands up in the Appeal, Supreme and European courts), there will be no negative implications for you. If we win, the situation is unclear. It could be that the plaintiff David Dully would be liable for all of the costs - in the region of a million euro. It could be that the six members of your executive committee who purported to sanction the proceedings on May 19th 2017 would be liable. It could be that the members of the intended beneficiary (either Athlone Town AFC Ltd. or Athlone Town Athletic Football Club, which membership I assume to be identical) would be liable. And it could be that you are liable, as Garda Dully's claim to have taken the proceedings on your behalf was fully accepted in court. I presume it is up to the judges therefore, as to which of the above would be liable for the costs of the proceedings.

The other side of the money game is what happens if we lose, which is that the property would belong to the beneficiary. Here I have to direct you to the 'settlement agreement' of May 23rd 2019 (see Exhibit
*47* of The Undisputed Truth? - November 15th). Up to that fateful day, the intended beneficiary was clearly Athlone Town AFC Ltd. AKA Michael O'Connor, John Hayden and David Dully. Then it became something vague, a ''third party'' holding the property ''on trust'' for either ''Athlone Town Association Football Club'' ... ''or any successor club''. This was the first time that your club got a mention at the business end of court dealings, which only happened because I had insisted on its being considered at that stage. But I wouldn't be getting too excited, seeing as its mention was quickly followed by the word ''or''. The intended pay-off is almost certainly not to your good selves but to the members of Athlone Town Athletic FC, who had already been awarded E160,673 in Judgment no. 5.  So it's probably best to keep calm about next January's developments.

Do any of you know if your club was awarded the FAI's playing licence this year? Or was it awarded to the new club? The FAI isn't telling. The clock is ticking and time is not on your side. How much do you care about saving your club? What are you now, today? Do you pay an annual membership fee? Do you still have meetings? When was the last time you or your executive committee voted on anything? When did you elect them, as you are required to do annually? Did you approve the contracts with Pre Season? Have you seen them? What is your relationship with Athlone Town AFC Ltd.? Do you accept its claim to have acquired the right to run your club on June 28th 2017? Apart from whether or not that move was legal (it wasn't) and whether or not there is any precedent for a private members' club being operated by a company (I have no idea), what is the system of checks and balances by which Athlone Town AFC Ltd. is made accountable to you for the income which it handles on behalf of your club?  Put it this way Judge, as Michael Forde SC is wont to say, let's pretend that something terrible has happened. The board of Athlone Town AFC Ltd. has been killed in a tragic accident and it is replaced by an unscrupulous twosome. What protections have you in place to stop the new guys getting their hands on your money?

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the Appeal Court verdict. It's a complicated case but not that complicated. There is a lot of ignorance around Athlone about how this (temporary?) little coup was pulled off . So I'll leave you a kind of distilled pocket book version of the case, the story of how E121k was marked for delivery to the members of Athlone Town Athletic Football Club on one gloomy November day in 2018. 

The money in question (from a VAT refund) was paid to me as part of an arrangement by which everything above E450k of my investment was put down as a loan. In retrospect, my plan to have the cooperative brought to a position where it could buy the stadium (for something in the region of E300,000) within five years was overly optimistic. As such and considering the financial pressure that was to come, I remain grateful to our company's then members (I was not one of them) for insisting that I enter this arrangement - especially to Paddy McCaul, Tom Fitzgerald and Tom Burke.

The arrangement was recorded, semi-formally, in a Heads of Agreement. 

The VAT refund was introduced to proceedings on March 12th 2018, in an innocuous fashion,  in an affidavit our counsel drafted for me. 

On April 9th 2018, the three documents below were among 15 planted with my affidavit from that date [The first was prepared by me in respect of my personal receipts and expenses, in order to assist the FAI with its purchase of the stadium. The second has the full VAT refund recorded at March 7th. The third has the main payment to me recorded at April 25th]

sis.

On April 10th, as the trial began I was asked to swear another affidavit, drafted by our counsel. This had a dodgy line at Paragraph 9 (below) relating to the refund, but I assumed there was some good reason for it and swore the affidavit on that basis. Our solicitor paid stamp duty on it in the central office, but he did not file it.

The refund was used three days later to make me look like a crook in cross-examination, paying our company's money to myself. In order to pull this off, the Heads of Agreement could not be exhibited. [Similarly, my loans to your club could be referenced but the contracts could not be exhibited, and its charitable purposes makeup also meant that our company's constitution could not be exhibited]. 

[Making me look like a crook was an interesting choice by the barristers. There was no need to do it, because the judgment was in the bag anyway. In itself, it was an interesting experience, to put it mildly. The setup for Garda Dully's counsel was one thing. His being joined by our counsel in the attack was something else. I remember looking into the crowd, which included a lot of you. All but one of you were supporting Garda Dully. We had Tony Connaughton, no one else. Even your members Cieran Temple and Paddy McCaul chose not to attend. It is difficult to describe the intensity of that life-changing moment, the instant journey from humiliation through shock to absolute clarity. The senior barristers were hopping up and down, passing the knife between them like a baton, but I kept my dignity as best I could by not answering them. Instead I scanned a room of hostile and smirking faces (and in fairness, one compassionate female face from the opposition), and Tony with his head down]

Sometime during that day, the affidavit I swore on April 10th was filed in the central office. It was effectively, if not actually (the time of filing is not recorded), filed after the case had ended. Because that was its purpose, to enable that ''dodgy line'' to be cashed in on by the opposition. The judgment (delivered no more than 30 minutes after evidence had ended, just a tidy up to cover any actual evidence I managed to introduce during cross-examination - my ''credibility'' was ''in tatters'' apparently) gave the green light for Garda Dully to sue our company for 'damages'.

Among other opportunistic claims, Garda Dully's June 1st 2018 affidavit targeted the refund in its Paragraphs 10 and 11 (below), tying together the planted documents of April 9th and the ''dodgy line''.

In order to facilitate Garda Dully, it was vital for our legal team to block the Heads of Agreement from being exhibited. In order to stop its being referred to, it was necessary to stop me and our accountant Philip O'Farrell from giving evidence. Mr. O'Farrell drafted an affidavit which was to exhibit the document at its Paragraph 9 (below). But our team managed to get past a deadline date without telling him, so it was never used and Mr. O'Farrell has yet to appear as a witness in person.

I managed to trick our solicitor by pretending to go to an Athlone solicitor with Mr. McCaul on August 13th 2018 and instead skipping off to Dublin to file my own affidavit in the High Court, which affidavit of course exhibited the Heads of Agreement. Our team then had to find a way to get put that affidavit out of business. 

Garda Dully's counsel Mr. Shortt SC pretended on September 11th 2018 that he wanted the affidavit accepted, so he could get at me in the witness box. Our solicitor and counsel pretended they wanted to save me from that terrible fate and our counsel argued that the affidavit was illegally filed. Judge Humphreys pretended he didn't know what to do, then he struck it out. All the pretending came apart comically when the prosecuting barrister in the Judge kicked in and he asked Mr. Shortt if he wanted to cross-examine me anyway, ''seeing as it's out there''. Mr. Shortt could only say ''No, Judge'' to the sound of air escaping from a balloon.

During the proceedings on November 13th 2018, Mr. Forde SC said about me and that ''dodgy line''  - ''If he fully understood the factual position, he could not have made that statement''.  Quite a declaration, considering he had written it himself. Paddy McCaul gave evidence for our company. He tried his best, but the Heads of Agreement wasn't mentioned and in his Fifth Judgment (below) Judge Humphreys went on to award the refund to the members of the new club.

The judge then gave the green light to the Plaintiff to sue the directors of our company for the moolah. This Garda Dully did in his November 22nd 2018 affidavit. 

It was necessary to sue all the directors in order to get at the one director who had the E121k refund. It is therefore unclear whether Messrs. Temple and McCaul were ever being seriously sued. One more than the other maybe, if subsequent events are anything to go by. 

Garda Dully's people didn't entirely think it through; because of the power afforded by my being sued personally, there was no way the barristers could keep the Heads of Agreement out of court. It was Mr. O'Farrell who finally exhibited it, with his March 25th 2019 affidavit. That meant that the barristers had to change tack and try to use the supposed majority rule of Messrs. McCaul and Temple within our company to force it into a 'settlement'. Unfortunately, they had to give up on the E120k and Garda Dully had to 'settle' for E100k. I assume that is why, when we later challenged the legality of that 'settlement', that Judge Costello brought the target (this time for the lawyers only - security for costs for the preliminary appeal) back to E120k [security for costs for the main appeal is a sane E50k]. 

And that, Boys and Girls, is to give you a flavour of how the Law is played to suit the well connected. The attempt to get the E120k may ultimately have failed, but (if my information is correct) it was a shot to nothing. My information is that the only money Garda Dully has had to pay the lawyers is the E50k which was siphoned out of our account with the Court of Appeal on September 28th 2019. And that money, theft being theft, will have to be paid back over time. Perhaps Garda Dully should stop listening to assurances from others on fail-safe means of gaming the system and take personal responsibility for a case which was taken in his name only.

It is hard to know if you still support the Plaintiff or not, mostly because you have yet to vote on whether to take the case or not. However it happened, I would like to thank you for letting it happen and giving me the experience of a lifetime. It has been wonderful to discover our strength in the face of intimidation. Even a stupid farmer (as I've been called or, more accurately, advised by our counsel to be on April 12th 2018) like me has been able to hold his own among these very important people. Truth has a power of its own, they cannot kill it. It comes down to that, and how you live your life. They are small people, we are not. Respect and cooperation must never be allowed to fall to bullying and corruption.

I need to know what you think of all this now. I am tired of trying to deal with people who just stand passively on the sidelines and contribute nothing in the way of analysis, debate, values or vision. If you have any ideas for saving your club and/or the stadium, now is the time to share them.

Yours sincerely,                                                                                                                                              

Declan Molloy (Athlone Town Stadium Ltd.)