Ken Bates ruined our lives, ex-Leeds Utd director tells harassment court

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Leeds County Court was told that Mr Bates had harassed Yorkshire businessman Melvyn Levi, who successfully sued him for libel in 2009. Mr Bates was then ordered to pay £50,000 libel damages to Mr Levi over allegations that he was a “shyster” who tried to blackmail the club over money.

Mr Levi has now taken Mr Bates back to court, seeking damages for harassment from him, the club and Yorkshire Radio, the station which broadcasts live commentary of United matches.

He also seeks an injunction against Mr Bates to prevent further harassment. The two men fell out following Mr Bates’s takeover of the club in 2005.

Mr Levi told the court that he and his wife Carole has been made ill after Mr Bates made a number of distressing remarks about him in the Leeds United match day programme.

In a witness statement handed to the court, Mr Levi said he lived in “constant fear” that Mr Bates would use his programme notes to cause him further distress.

He said he had sought the help of a psychiatrist, slept poorly and had become “extremely irritable”, making “family life extremely difficult”.

He said he and his wife rarely went out, adding, “It is not an exaggeration that since Mr Bates recommenced his acts of harassment against us, it has completely ruined our lives.”

Giving evidence, Mrs Levi suggested that the Leeds United chairman should be “locked up” for the distress he had caused.

She said: “Really, he should be locked up. If this is all he can do with his life, he should be locked up. It’s terrible.”

Earlier, Mrs Levi had told the court: “Mr Bates has stolen six and a half years of our lives - six and a half precious years.

“We are well into our sixties now. We should be having a good time, not sitting in court, boring everybody to pieces.

“We are very small fry. I would have thought that he would have taken on somebody on a much larger scale than us.”

The 2009 High Court case heard that Mr Levi’s libel action arose out of events surrounding the acquisition of Leeds United Football Club by a consortium headed by Mr Bates in 2005.

Mr Levi was one of the members of a consortium - the Yorkshire Consortium - which bought the club about 10 months before Mr Bates’s purchase.

The entrepreneur sued over “grave and offensive” libels in three articles written by Mr Bates in the Leeds United programme in 2006 and 2007 and a letter written to club members in August 2007.

Part of his case was that, in an article published in a programme in March 2007 entitled The Enemy Within, he was accused of blackmail, of being dishonourable and of making unscrupulous attempts to obtain money which had deterred investors in Leeds United.

In his ruling the judge, Sir Charles Gray, said the “sting” of one of the publications lay in the reference to Mr Levi as a “shyster”.

“That term would in my judgment have been understood to mean that Mr Levi is someone who engages in sharp, disreputable and dishonest practices,” said Sir Charles.

The judge described the allegation of blackmail as “particularly serious”.

• Much more in Tuesday’s Yorkshire Post