RE: Court case20 Jan 2025 11:57
“To put a similar point in a different way, the Defendant was not buying Mr Demissie’s time for two years, it was buying the chance that Mr Demissie’s efforts would bring about financial close in respect of debt and/or equity and agreeing to pay him if they did within a two year period.”
On the contrary, in my view it represents a clear and workable balance of the parties’ respective interests starting from a context where there was a hope for financial close by October 2018 but all realised there was a considerable degree of uncertainty about that and so a long stop date would be sensible. In the balance of risk and reward, two years was agreed for such a date.
Counter claim
Mr Demissie was saying he wanted USD 100k because he was short of cash but expressly on the basis that it would be off-set from his commission “as before”. It is also clear that there would be no agreement from the Defendant’s side unless Mr Adams got board approval.
It is also fanciful for Mr Demissie to assert and maintain that the 205k Payments were not linked to the ANS agreements and/or the equity contributions to be made by ANS which would trigger substantial commission payments being owed to Mr Demissie.
However, for the reasons which are contained in this judgment, I do not find objectively his evidence merits much weight when balanced against the documents. In this respect, I consider Mr Demissie typical of many party witnesses in that any possibility of genuine and accurate recall gets swamped by the imperative of winning the litigation and the engagement in a process designed to achieve that end.
Shame it went to court obvious that Harry expected TK get over the line within the timeframe of the contract hence was happy to let him have some money that would be paid back in the case it did not happen in the expectation that it would get over the line and any money paid to him would be well worth it to help get a deal done.
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