AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEGENDARY PUNTER USED TO BLOCK £852,000 BETTING CLAIM

by Dominique Searle http://www.chronicle.gi/headlines_details.php?id=22452




An autobiography written by one of horseracing’s most colourful characters, the charitable but cunning pensioner Barney Curley, is being used in evidence against him by Phill Brear, Gibraltar’s Gambling Commissioner, a former Deputy Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police.

Five people who placed bets on winning horses are distancing themselves from Mr Curley and asking the Gibraltar Supreme Court to release £852,000 in winnings that the Rock’s gaming authority has blocked.



The case may well become central to determining Gibraltar’s standing as an independent authority. The dispute comes at a time when there are British Government plans to require offshore operators to be licensed with the UK Gambling Commission for bets that are placed from UK.

BOOKIES

Quoting extensively from ‘Barney Curley –giving a little back’ Mr Brear and Petfre (Gibraltar), the company that runs the Betfred operation, are contesting a judicial review application made by the five punters. They deny being fronts for Mr Curley or part of the ‘coup’ which he has openly boasted about in the British national and racing press.

Damian Hall, Rupert Collier, James Tetherton, Emmett Monaghan and Luke McBride accuse the Gibraltar commissioner of acting without authority and point to the fact that other gaming regulators, including the UK Gambling Commission, of which Mr Brear was once operations chief, have allowed payouts on these same punts.

Bookies are highly allergic to Mr Curley and often will not take a bet if they know he is behind it. The Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner’s reason for halting payout is akin to accusing Mr Curley of being involved in a gaming equivalent of insider trading.

COURT PAPERS

Court documents obtained by the Chronicle go further. Mr Brear accuses the claimants not only of failing to make a full disclosure of all material facts, but of having “falsely averred that their accounts are not proxy accounts for Mr Curley.”

Non disclosure, he says, is a sufficient reason for refusing the payout or even the court action to proceed.

Mr Brear asserts that the claimants have filed witness statements stating that they are “not proxy accounts for Mr Curley, that they are not in the habit of and did not place bets for Mr Curley at any stage, and that they are unaware of the particular reason why this is now alleged against them.”

Mr Curley is not a claimant in the action now before the Gibraltar courts.

Significantly whilst Betfred describes Gibraltar as hosting “the world’s leading online gambling operators” Mr Brear discloses correspondence with his United Kingdom counterparts which suggests that Gibraltar is applying more stringent regulation than Britain.

EMAILS

An email received August 23 2010 from Neill Ireland, Head of Intelligence at the Sport Betting Intelligence Unit (SBIU) at the Gambling Commission says that the SBIU “have a fairly full picture of the degree of co-ordination in betting around this ‘coup’ and Curley himself admits that he was at the centre of this co-ordination. He has been interviewed and apparently given the names of the persons he used to place the bets. Our enquiries have also identified these individuals.”

Then in another email dated September 22 2010 from the Director of Integrity Service, Paul Scotney, at the British Horseracing Authority, Mr Brear is told that “Barney Curley has used inside information (which he will legitimately have as a race horse trainer) to place a series of bets directly (or indirectly through other parties) on horses to win. This in itself is not a breach of our Rules as he had not communicating (sic) inside information directly or indirectly to any other person for any material reward, gift, favour or benefit of any kind. The reality is that this type of behaviour happens on a daily basis….I have no doubt that had the betting organisations in Gibraltar (and for that matter in this country) known Barney Curley was behind this, they would not have taken his bets, which is what they have done in the past.”

INTERVIEWS

The Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner produces to the court a series of interviews in the UK press including The Guardian, The Independent and the Racing Post which recall Mr Curley’s most famous triumph when Mr Curley staged a major coup in 1975 with Yellow Sam winning at a country track in Ireland.

Armed with the knowledge that there was only one telephone in the town by the race course he is said to have had a friend hog the line pretending to have a dying aunt speaking her last words. Off-course bookies were unable to cut Yellow Sam’s starting price.

‘NOT MONEY’

Betfred, who alerted the Gibraltar authority to their concerns, say that the dispute is not about money. “The company will always honour bona fide bet,” it says adding that it became aware of “irregular betting activity” on May 10 2010. It believes that 50 accounts were opened for the purpose of the coup. Betfred allege that the claimants are in fact friends and family of Mr Curley.

Betfred’s lawyers make the comparison with the insurance industry saying that “if a person obtained insurance cover as insured from an insurer ‘fronting’ the policy for another person knowing the insurer would not have insured that individual…..this would entitle to insurer to void the insurance contract.”

Mr Brear is represented by James Neish, QC, of TSN, Betfred are represented by Nigel Feetham of Hassans and the claimants are represented locally by Ray Pilley of Triay& Triay acting on instructions from Thomas T Montague solicitors.