A private equity company accused of ousting a multimillionaire used car salesman from his own business has offered to pay €1.1m (£950,000) to settle a separate case with him.
Peter Waddell filed his first high court claim against Freshstream last year, alleging that the investment firm used an independent investigation into contested sexist, racist and abusive comments “as a means of securing [his] exclusion” from his used car empire, Big Motoring World. Freshstream had acquired a one-third share in Big during 2022.
In a second high court case, the founder also claimed that the private equity group had forced his forfeiture of a €1.5m investment into one of Freshstream funds because the firm viewed him as a “nuisance” and “was motivated by the primary desire to remove [a Waddell investment company] from the fund and end the ongoing relationship”.
Freshstream, which says one of Waddell’s companies was removed from the investment after refusing to make a scheduled payment, has now offered to settle the second claim by paying him €1.1m, which it calculates is Waddell’s net contribution after previously receiving €450,000 from the fund.
The firm made the offer while also stating that it acted properly, with its high court defence filing adding: “Freshstream was entitled to exercise its discretion to forfeit [Waddell’s company’s] partnership interest in the fund when [it] failed to pay the sum due.”
The parties have yet to agree to any settlement.
The potential settlement comes as Waddell and Freshstream prepare for a high court showdown next year over the first legal claim, which centres on allegations that Waddell’s April 2024 exit from Big was triggered by an investigation into his conduct.
Waddell’s court filings allege that he was prevented from responding to accusations of using “extremely serious racist abuse and sexual harassment of female employees”, and that the allegations were used by his “capricious” investors to secure his “exclusion from Big”.
The businessman – who has autism, dyslexia and partial deafness, for which he now wears two hearing aids – had been signed off work by a doctor for four weeks with a heart condition on 28 March 2024, his court papers say, and was invited five days later – on 2 April – to an “investigation interview” that would take place on 9 April.
The court filings go on to claim that at the interview, 764 pages of evidence were to be considered. Waddell’s lawyers requested more time but the company pressed on without him, on the basis that there would be an “intolerable risk” to the business in delaying.
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The claims being made against Waddell, some of which were historical and were not formally dealt with by the company at the time, included allegedly telling a female cleaner: “I bet you’d like to suck my dick?”, according to defence filings submitted to the high court by a Freshstream holding company.
The investigation found, having interviewed 22 sources, that a “material default event” had occurred in 15 out of the 27 allegations, which Freshstream says justified Waddell’s removal from the company.
Aside from the specifics of the claim, the case is also likely to highlight a wider theme of founders claiming that some investment companies have used clauses in their agreements to oust entrepreneurs from their own companies.