Petey increases his legal bill to Chris Bovey by £6,169.92

Author: Ellen Harrison

Another day, another dumbass move from Dumbass “Peter” Reynolds. We carried the story last December that Reynolds had tried hard to convince the High Court that his lost libel case against Chris Bovey should be reinstated because Chris’ lawyers hadn’t informed him how to sue them, and had been duly smacked down by HHJ Holroyde.

A copy of the judgement of HHJ Holroyde refusing Reynolds permission to appeal can be read here.

Since then, Chris has been sending High Court Sheriffs round to Petey’s for the day of reckoning, but for all his previous rantings about service, he’s been nowhere to be found …

We at PRW have been awaiting with bated breath the next steps of Satan’s irritating distant cousin, sure that the only sensible (and legal) thing to do, to pay up, would be about as likely to happen as Peter’s right hand man Derek realising he’s a bit of an arse.

Sure enough, it came. Peter Reynolds got in touch, not to organise some kind of empty whiskey bottle instalment plan, but to say that he had filed another application in Court to try and get the Sheriffs off his back, while he tried to get permission to appeal yet again, this time in person to the same HHJ Holroyde who bitchslapped him first time round.

We don’t even need to explain how stupid the basis of this “appeal” is, but put it this way: say you were in a school, and one of the other kids wrote on a whiteboard that you were a racist, sexist, antisemitic homophobe who ratted out medical cannabis users to the police and then wiped it off. And you went crying to the teacher, and that teacher said that it wasn’t against the school rules if you couldn’t prove that anyone had seen it. And then you wrote to the headmaster to complain that the teacher was wrong and had stupid hair, and the headmaster pointed out that their interpretation of the school rules was in fact correct and there wasn’t a lot he could or would do about it – what do you rate your chances of going to the headmaster’s office and explaining in person why he and the original teacher are flat out wrong?

So far, so dumb. But that doesn’t even begin to match the brazen stupidity of the content of Peter Reynolds’ application to the High Court to have the costs stayed. It gets a bit complicated to wade through, but essentially Reynolds claimed that:

a) he’d never received the Final Bill of Costs from Chris (i.e., the bits of paper that outline exactly what the old goat owes) and that

b) because he was appealing the judgement of HHJ Holroyde, he shouldn’t have to pay anyway.

The written response of Chris’ barrister Roger Mallalieu has to be read to be believed. If you have a few moments and a legal eye, reading it in full will brighten up your day.

If you don’t have the time, to summarise, Mr Mallalieu gently pointed out that:

a) Peter Reynolds must have received the Final Bill of Costs, because he’d written to Chris’ lawyers about it the week he got it. Mr Mallalieu also didn’t quite understand how exactly the rest of the documents Peter had admitted receiving had gotten there if the only bit of paper which actually had his address on it had never arrived. By owl, perhaps?

b) Appeals proceedings don’t actually stop costs proceedings. It’s written right there in the Civil Procedure Rules, the rulebook the Courts run on. Claiming that they do is just kind of stupid. Like, “Oh, I’ve been fighting legal action single-handedly for nearly 3 years now and apparently I still haven’t read the CPR even though these kinds of simple mistakes have cost me £20K and counting” stupid. Read the fucking manual, Petey.

Apparently, it didn’t go so well in Court. We got an exclusive peek into the proceedings from Mr Bovey himself, who attended the hearing with his barrister and lawyer. Mr Bovey described the scene:

“It was hilarious to see Reynolds make such an idiot of himself in front of a High Court Master and then get ordered by the Court to pay the bill of £6,169.92 for the honour of being humiliated in front of both myself and my lawyer.

“I’d already seen Reynolds make an arse of himself in the Royal Courts of Justice last year when Master Eastman struck out his case, I never expected to get to see him make such a twat of himself again in the very same Court,” said Chris Bovey.

At the end of it all, Petey was bitchslapped by the High Court for the third, fourth, fifth time? We lose count. The reward for the five minutes he spent pasting together his argument from dog spit and whiskey labels? £6,169.92 costs to the defendant. He also paid £150 for the hearing lol.

You might very well think, “Oh, but PRW, we’ve been here so many times before” and you’d be right, sadly. Peter Reynolds has proven an expert at dragging things out beyond all expectations and reasoned sanity. But the difference this time is, there’s a time limit on this one, the 7th July. And the Master made sure to put at the bottom of his order that “Permission to appeal Paragraph 1 is refused.”

In theory Petey could still make a written request for permission to appeal the verdict of Master Haworth, but we’re informed the chances of that being granted is as likely as Elvis being found alive on a double decker bus on the Moon. We do hope he is stupid enough to do so.

Chris’ Counsel has also secured as part of the Master’s order a summons to get Peter Reynolds to present himself again at the Royal Courts of Justice to give details of all of his assets and explain away this little matter of a Facebook comment in which he claimed to have “carefully arranged” his assets in the event of having his ass handed to him on a plate, a scenario which duly came to pass.

“Arranging” your assets to get out of paying your Court costs being, of course, pretty damn illegal. We’ll have more on that as it explodes into ranting about trolls and liars.

So, an extra £6,169.92. 7th July, by 4pm. We’re waiting, Petey. *popcorn*