A further 3,300 documents have been produced in relation to the case involving billionaire businessman John Magnier over the sale of a large estate in Co Tipperary.
In addition, a “gargantuan” computer search of the servers relating to the Barne Estate holding company in Jersey has already generated three terabytes of data and the process may not be complete until the week after next, the Commercial Court has heard.
Mr Magnier, his son John Paul Magnier and his daughter Katherine Wachman are suing Barne Estate owner Richard Thompson-Moore and three companies of IQEQ (Jersey), the holding company of the Barne Estate shares, over a purported sale which took place on August 22nd, 2023.
They allege that at Mr Magnier’s home in Coolmore, he and Mr Thomson-Moore agreed the sale of the 751-acre estate for a price of €15 million.
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Mr Thomson-Moore’s case is that no such sale took place and instead he plans to sell the estate to American-based businessman Maurice Regan for €22.5 million.
The case has already generated more than 150,000 original documents. It was due to start on April 11th but the start has been postponed to allow for more discovery on the defendant’s side.
Caren Geoghegan SC, counsel for Mr Magnier, told the court that of the 3,300 documents that were discovered last Friday, 2,500 have already been produced by the defendants. Of those documents, the privilege status of 1,200 of them have been changed.
Mr Magnier’s side has asked, “as a matter of urgency” for a schedule for those documents that are still being retained as privileged, she said.
Niall Buckley, counsel for Mr Thomson-Moore, said there is “little novelty in the vast majority” of many of the documents that his side has produced. Many of them have already been independently produced as part of the discovery process.
FTI Consulting is undertaking an analysis of information in two servers belonging to IQEQ (Jersey) Ltd. Mr Buckley asked the Commercial Court for an extension of time last week and an interim report is being published on Friday.
It was a “gargantuan data capture” case, he explained. A scan of one of the servers, the G server, has been running “for multiple days” as part of digital scanning exercise which has already produced three terabytes of data.
It could be next week or the week after when that process is completed. “They can’t say with certainty because there is no progress update. The largest part of the process is in the original data capture. They are reasonably confident it will be done by the middle of next week. They are highly confident that it would be done with another week,” he told the court.
Mr Justice Max Barrett adjourned the case for mention until Thursday, May 1st. The case is due to start on May 27th.
