A judge has said she did not believe a man was called a thief and a liar by staff at a Dublin city centre Sports Direct store during an incident that arose over the purchase of a pair of trainers.<\/p>\n
Judge Sarah Berkeley threw out a \u20ac70,000 Circuit Civil Court damages claim for defamation brought by Faisal Ahmed, of Grange Road, Baldoyle, Dublin 13, against the retailer.<\/p>\n
The judge told barrister EJ Walsh, for the defendants, that \u201ca telling video\u201d of the incident in Sports Direct\u2019s Earl Street store convinced the court Ahmed was not the victim of racist remarks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have had the advantage of seeing a video and it is telling in my view. He was extremely aggressive, was intimidating to staff and his behaviour was far from acceptable,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The judge told Walsh, who appeared with Miley and Miley Solicitors, she simply did not accept Ahmed was called a thief and a liar and dismissed his claim. Ahmed was directed to pay the company\u2019s legal costs in defending the case.<\/p>\n
Ahmed claimed he was told by staff during a dispute about the price he was charged: \u201cYou are lying, get out of here, you are bullying staff.\u201d <\/p>\n
He also alleged staff said they would not give him his receipt back and that one worker asked security in the store to \u201cthrow him out\u201d.<\/p>\n
Walsh said the store conceded Ahmed was charged \u20ac139.50 for the pair of Boss trainers he brought to checkout and he was mistaken in believing the shoes were advertised at \u20ac115.<\/p>\n
In cross-examination, Walsh told Ahmed he simply brought a different pair of shoes to the checkout than those he saw priced at \u20ac115 and was properly charged \u20ac139.50. <\/p>\n
Ahmed said he noticed once outside the shop that he was \u201cwrongly charged\u201d and went back in to sort it out. <\/p>\n
Members of staff, who gave evidence, said they knew Ahmed paid for the shoes he mistakenly selected and they were dealing with rectifying the matter when he became irate, started to abuse them and began recording the episode on his phone.<\/p>\n
Chloe Nugent, now the store manager, said she was dealing with the matter but was left completely shaken by Ahmed\u2019s aggressive attitude. She said she let another member of staff deal with him as she started to feel uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
Walsh told the court Ahmed was given an option of a refund or to exchange the shoes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A judge has said she did not believe a man was called a thief and a liar by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,13553,615,61,60,186692],"class_list":["post-427033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-circuit-court","tag-dublin","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports-direct"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}