High Court date for Davies Betfair share negligence case
Couple due in court on July 8 - seeking £4m damages for alleged negligence and/or breach of retainer for advice former law firm gave them when they tried to sell Betfair shares in weeks immediately following IPO.
Mark Davies, a member of the founding team at Betfair, and his wife Miranda, are due in London’s High Court on July 8 for a two-day hearing to decide whether or not they are entitled to up to £4m in damages from former lawyers Speechly Bircham.
Davies (pictured) and his wife, as trustees of two family trusts, are seeking millions of pounds in damages for alleged negligence and/or breach of retainer for advice the firm gave them when they tried to sell their Betfair shares in the weeks immediately following the operator’s initial public offering on the London stock exchange in October 2010.
In a claim lodged in the Queen’s Bench division of the High Court on 16 August last year, Davies, who left the operator in July 2010 after 10 years, reportedly instructed private client partner Charles Hutton to sell the couple’s shares at £13 a share following the betting exchange’s IPO on 22 October 2010, but was then allegedly told a sale would not be possible as the shares had not been registered properly.
When Betfair floated on 22 October shares were trading at £15.50, however the stock suffered a 60% decline in value from October 2010 to August last year. It has since stabilised to £8.05 at the time of writing due largely to a number of positive announcements including the forthcoming arrival on August 1 of Breon Corcoran, former Paddy Power head of online, as its new chief executive as well as inroads in gaining an Italian licence, in mobile market share and the gradual launch of fixed odds sports betting on its site.
Since that date the Davies’s Trusts have not sold any shares, with the price per share standing at £6.08 at the time the claim was issued.
The couple, who are trustees of the Giselle Davies Family Trust and the Davies Family Trust which both hold stakes in Betfair, argue that that the losses caused by Speechly’s advice stands at around £4m.
Davies now runs PR consultancy Camberton, is a non executive director of mobile gaming specialist Probability and an investor in a number of gaming and non-gaming related businesses.