Calzaghe wins £1.8m legal fight with Warren
• Promoter claimed boxer had 'orally' agreed Hopkins contract
• Appeal expected after judge dismisses £1m counter claim
The opponents who once were friends were still throwing verbal blows after the bell but Joe Calzaghe emerged from his High Court fight with Frank Warren yesterday £1.8m better off.
Mr Justice Wyn Williams ordered Warren to pay the recently retired boxer the money Calzaghe claimed for his fight against Bernard Hopkins. The judge dismissed a counter claim for £1m by Warren, who said later he will appeal the amount he has been ordered to pay.
Warren and his company secretary, Ed Simons, told the court they had a meeting before the Hopkins fight with Calzaghe, his solicitor and his father Enzo at which the boxer agreed to a further contract. Mr Justice Williams said: "I say now there are aspects of the evidence given by each of these persons which has caused me to reflect long and hard upon their credibility, accuracy and reliability. If an oral agreement was concluded as alleged, I have no doubt that some written record would have been created prior to the fight with Mr Hopkins."
He said all of Calzaghe's fights for Warren, since January 1998, had been covered by written terms. "In my judgment it simply beggars belief that no written record of this alleged promotional agreement would have been created," he said.
"Mr Warren and Mr Simons are astute and experienced businessmen who have a keen eye for their own commercial interests ... it means that their behaviour in failing to produce one shred of paper which recorded this alleged agreement is inexplicable.
"There was a powerful motivating factor for the claimant [Mr Warren] to rely upon an alleged oral agreement even though the same did not exist. In the absence of such an agreement, the claimant owed the defendant a very substantial sum of money which remained unpaid after the fight between the defendant and Mr Hopkins. The claim in his case has been raised as a smokescreen by the claimant as an attempt to avoid payment by the claimant to the defendant of a very substantial sum of money."
Warren said: "I am, of course, extremely disappointed that the judge did not go further in accepting we had an agreement with Joe to promote his last fights. This is especially so as the judge criticised Joe and his lawyer [Gareth Williams]."
Calazaghe said: "I am relieved and delighted at the court's decision to award me £1.8m. The fight was not one which I sought but I am delighted to have remained undefeated through it."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/ma ... court-case
