Paddy Cosgrave, a founder of The Web Summit, drafted an email in January 2019 telling the IDA that his tech conference no longer wanted its “hush money” after the agency complained about one of his tweets.
The email remained as a draft because David Kelly, Cosgrave’s co-founder, refused to send it, believing that the company’s relationship with the IDA would be destroyed.
An affidavit filed by Kelly in a High Court case in which he is alleging shareholder oppression by Cosgrave, contains details of an email he received from Kevin Sammon, a director of the IDA, in 2018. It followed a tweet by Cosgrave complaining about the lack of IDA executives at that year’s Web Summit in Lisbon. In fact three IDA executives had attended.
“I struggle to understand what the purpose of highlighting IDA Ireland’s involvement in this manner is, and whether his company thinks it appropriate to do so,” Sammon wrote. He added that no other conference organisers caused the IDA “the same issues”.
“If we are to consider any future relationship I will need written assurances that the nature of our participation will not be made the subject of public comment by your founder in future,” he said.
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Sammon argued that Cosgrave’s inaccurate tweet had followed “another particularly regrettable” incident in New Orleans during its sponsorship of the F.Ounders event at the tech conference Collision. In his affidavit Kelly alleged that this was a reference to Cosgrave “slow clapping” an IDA executive who addressed the event.
Cosgrave drafted a response to Sammon’s email in January 2019 and asked Kelly to send it from his email account. The email questioned the extent of the IDA’s support for the conference, saying: “The IDA has only ever been a minor commercial partner at our events.”
On Sammon’s request for “written assurances” about future public comments, Cosgrave wanted to say that the Web Summit did not offer a “hush money” system for government agencies. “Our company reserves the right to comment on the actions or inactions of any of our commercial partners, past or present,” he said.
Cosgrave added that the Web Summit was “no longer comfortable” working with the IDA. “We worry [about] the growing reputational risks of working with an organisation prepared to engage in such underhand means of communication and spin,” he wrote. Cosgrave told Kelly he that planned to send a similar message to Enterprise Ireland.
Kelly said he had declined to send the email. “It is fortuitous for Web Summit that I was successful in resisting Cosgrave’s attempts to destroy [its] relationship with both the IDA and Enterprise Ireland in January 2019, because I note that during the course of 2020, Web Summit received in excess of €500,000 from the government of Ireland through grants from Enterprise Ireland,” he said.
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Yesterday a Web Summit spokesman said that Kelly was “rehashing old claims and piling up new ones in an attempt to deflect from the legal case Web Summit has taken against him in Ireland for breach of fiduciary duty”.
Kelly also said in his affidavit that Cosgrave had hired journalists and lawyers as employees of the conference company who subsequently worked on political campaigns for him. He said that Cosgrave had not told him about a potential €200 million deal to sell the business in 2017, and did not tell him in advance that the company was donating €1 million to charity during the pandemic.
Cosgrave is also suing Kelly, who owns 12 per cent of The Web Summit, in Dublin and Calfiornia, alleging that Kelly cut him out of a fund established using the Web Summit’s “brand, resources and assets”.
@colincoyle
