Following the decision of the Gibraltar Supreme Court to rule against Karel Manasco after accusations of extortion of company accounts, the former Mansion Group CEO has suffered a further legal setback.
The Supreme Court rejected the claims of Manasco who had stated that he was treated unfairly during the legal process.
Although Manasco was given a right to appeal when it came to specific elements of the procedural decision, claims over bias in the process were dismissed by the Supreme Court.
Manasco was previously told to pay more than €2.5m to Mansion Group, after it was found that the funds had been obtained illegally from the Gibraltar firm.
At the heart of the claim was the payment of lucrative consultancy fees from Mansion Group to White Wizard Media (WWML), a company that Mansion stated provided ‘no service’ to the operator.
A total of 14 invoices from WWML to Mansion were accrued totalling a fee of €2,508,035.36 made between 10 August 2018 to 13 June 2019.
Mansion is alleging that through these payments, Manasco transferred money into offshore jurisdictions and benefited personally. The former CEO has continued to challenge these claims.
It ran alongside a separate case against Manasco in which the court also ruled in favour of Mansion Group regarding fees paid to a KM consultancy firm totalling £127,073.28.
In February last year, the Gibraltar courts froze £5m worth of Manasco’s assets.
This decision was taken following allegations that Manasco had paid himself bonuses and personal payments that he shouldn’t have.
Manasco had stated that he felt judicial bias, adding that off the back of the Worldwide Freezing Order there was “antipathy and hostility towards him in subsequent rulings.”
He claimed that the freezing order “was used by the Claimants to indicate that I was dishonest and has continued to be so used, I am advised by my legal representative, as a means to attack my integrity and to punish me with baseless contempt proceedings, which still hang over me.
He added: The judge ought not to have publicly given a finding of evidence of dishonesty until he had heard the case on its merits, knowing full well the devastating effects which it would have. From this moment on the judge has shown an antipathy and hostility toward me that is inconsistent with his role requiring impartiality.”
The Supreme Court however defended the case standard and found no evidence of dishonesty against Manasco.
The former Mansion CEO intensified the legal battle through a counterclaim, which accused his old company of a myriad of offenses. These included operating without the relevant licenses and a host of regulatory misdemeanors.
Mansion requested a privacy order around this case stating that due to the illegality of the accusations and the significant impact they would on Mansion’s reputation privacy order was needed.
The implementation of a temporary privacy order for this counterclaim caused backlash from Manasco’s team, who stated that whilst there are exceptions to Open Justice, the case being sat in private was “obviously wrong and contrary to principle”.
However, the ruling underlined that the privacy order was temporary in nature and all information related to the case was released publicly in August 2024 commeserate with the Chief Justice’s opinion in the case.
The Supreme Court also dismissed this notion of any alleged impartiality as “groundless”. Judge Rimer also stated he “would refuse permission to appeal against the privacy order on this ground too. It has no prospect of success, nor does it raise any compelling reason for an appeal to be heard.”
