Former UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping just got sued and lost a handsome sum, in the amount of $426,000.00 due to his former manager. Outside the court room Bisping than proceeded to engage in a fight with the former manager.
The Manchester evening news has it:
Martial arts and cage fighting star, Michael Bisping, met his match when a top judge ticked him off for “scuffling” with his former agent outside court.
Bisping has been locked in a costly court war with agent, Anthony McGann, who claimed a slice of his worldwide earnings between 2005 and 2011.
And Judge Richard Salter QC said their “scuffle” in a court waiting area during the case went to show the “degree of ill-feeling” between them.
Bisping has now been ordered to pay his ex-agent over £300,000 – but neither of them emerged unbloodied from the two-week court bout.
McGann had “greatly exaggerated” his claim against the fighter and “put forward false documents and false evidence”, said the judge.
And Bisping’s behaviour had “fallen well short of the standard that the court is entitled to expect,” he added.
Lawyers’ bills run up during the 11-day trial were, he said, “almost certainly out of all proportion to the sums at stake.”
Bisping, from Clitheroe, Lancashire, is a star of the ultimate fighting championship and a former UFC middleweight champion.
The 38-year-old has been a stellar earner all over the world, particularly in America, as a cage fighter, mixed martial artist and actor.
Despite his denials, Judge Salter ruled that he did sign a management agreement with McGann in July 2005 and the agent was entitled to his cut.
But, in a damning decision, he said McGann’s evidence in court “varied between the aggressive and the obsequious.”
“In a number of respects his evidence was, in my judgment, plainly untruthful,” the judge added.
Letters and invoices the agent hoped would boost the value of his claim were “recent fabrications”, he said.
Bisping was a “more straightforward witness” but, like McGann, he was guilty of “tailoring and trimming his evidence to suit his case.”
Parts of his evidence were “incredible and untrue” and his description of facilities at the Wolfslair gym, in Widnes, was “a confected story”.
The judge added: “Mr Bisping was also a knowing participant with Mr McGann in the scheme to defraud the Australian tax authorities by overstating Mr Bisping’s expenses in 2010 and 2011.”
Although the final financial details have yet to be hammered out, the judge ruled that Bisping owes his former agent more than £320,000 in commission.
Judge Salter said he would hear further argument on who should have to pay the enormous legal costs of the case.
But his preliminary view was that it would be “an affront to justice” to order the fighter to pay any part of McGann’s legal bills.
He was also not minded to award Bisping any of his costs, “even in relation to those issues about which Mr McGann has sought to deceive the court.”
The judge said that, during the case, he was informed by security staff that there had been “a scuffle between Mr McGann and Mr Bisping in the waiting area just outside the courtroom.”
Neither denied that there had been “an incident” and the judge added: “I cautioned them that such behaviour in the precincts of the court could not be tolerated”.
