Former director of Web Summit Daire Hickey, who is suing his one-time friend and business partner, Paddy Cosgrave, is expected to give evidence in the bitter corporate legal dispute in Dublin on Tuesday.
Mr Hickey, who joined the business in 2010 before departing as an employee in 2017, is alleging that his rights as a minority shareholder in Manders Terrace, the trading company behind the tech conference business, were oppressed by Mr Cosgrave. He is also suing Mr Cosgrave for alleged breaches of a profit-sharing agreement.
The case is one of five involving Mr Cosgrave, Mr Hickey and another minority shareholder, David Kelly, being heard by Mr Justice Michael Twomey in a High Court trial that began last week.
Following his departure from Web Summit, Mr Hickey cofounded his own public relations company, 150Bond, which counts several high-profile technology multinationals among its clients. The Cork-born businessman was also a member of the RTÉ board until he resigned in January.
Mr Hickey, who owns 7 per cent of Manders Terrace, met Mr Cosgrave, who owns 81 per cent of the business, when they were students at Trinity College Dublin. They were both involved in The Phil, a college debating society, of which both men served terms as president.
Mr Hickey was invited into the business in 2010, his barrister, Eoin McCullough SC, said last week. While the company had run a couple of “small events” in Dublin in 2009, it grew rapidly in the years after Mr Hickey joined.
His chief tasks were “procuring and managing relationships with speakers and key sponsors, coordinating and creating content for the events, dealing with media relations”, Mr McCullough said.
What do Donald Trump’s April tariffs mean for Ireland?
However, the relationship between the two soured in the years after Mr Hickey moved to the US in 2013, chiefly to build Web Summit’s contacts but also, the court heard, to “avoid having to interact personally with Mr Cosgrave on a regular basis”.
He found the Web Summit chief executive to be “a very difficult person with whom to work” as well as “highly unpredictable” and prone to reacting with “extraordinary vitriol” when challenged.
Mr Hickey is alleging that Mr Cosgrave weaponised a 2016 sexual harassment complaint made against him by an employee to force him out of the company, from which he resigned as a director in 2019.
The court heard that Mr Hickey, who vehemently denies the allegation, was not even aware that a formal complaint had been made and was not given any chance to respond to the claims at the time.
He is expected to testify that Mr Cosgrave knew about the complaint as early as 2016 but launched a belated formal investigation into it in 2021. Mr Cosgrave is also alleged to have hinted at the investigation in posts on social media, intimating that Mr Hickey was a “sexual predator” without naming his former college friend.
Mr Hickey and Mr Kelly, who owns 12 per cent of Manders Terrace, want Mr Cosgrave to buy back their shares in the company. Their position is that a discount that normally applies to minority equity stakes in a company should not be applied in this case because of Mr Cosgrave’s oppression and because their business relationship was that of a so-called quasi-partnership.
Mr Cosgrave, who is vigorously defending himself in both sets of proceedings, is also suing Mr Kelly for alleged breaches of his duties when he was a director of the company.
