the times | Tuesday May 24 2022 V2 19
News
The organiser of Bestival, the four-day
music event, is being sued for £650,
over loans that were allegedly taken to
prop up the festival before it folded
three years ago.
Robert Gorham, 48, has been ac-
cused of poor financial management
long before the festival, which has fea-
tured Sir Elton John and Stevie Won-
der, was last held in 2018. The former
Radio 1 DJ known as Rob Da Bank has
been described in court as overseeing a
festival that was often on the verge of
financial disaster.
In 2018, when 50,000 people came to
watch the indie band London Gram-
mar and the soul singer Chaka Khan,
Bestival almost had to be cancelled
because Gorham was unable to pay for
portable lavatories, Central London
county court was told. It was only saved
by a last-minute injection of £249,000.
Gorham is being sued by Ticketline
Network, a sales company, which says it
lent about £1 million to keep the festival
running over several years and that the
DJ refused to pay back about £650,000.
Lawyers for Ticketline have told the
court that the company sent the loan
directly to Gorham and a co-director
because it was not confident that the
money would be safe if handed to the
Bestival business.
John Hughes, co-director of the festi-
val, has accepted that the loans were
made to him and Gorham and that they
have to be repaid. Gorham is fighting
the claim, however, in a ten-day trial in
which he has claimed that he never
agreed to a personal loan and should
not have to repay the funds.
In his defence, Gorham has denied
the facts as set out by Ticketline’s law-
yers. Bestival was an annual music festi-
val that was held for 12 years at Robin
Hill Country Park outside Newport on
DJ Rob Da Bank
sued over loans
for lavatories at
failing Bestival
Jonathan Ames Legal Editor the Isle of Wight. The event was moved
to Lulworth Castle, Dorset, in 2017 with
headliners including the Cure, New Or-
der and Duran Duran.
The festival spawned international
spin-offs in Toronto and Bali before
folding in 2019 after the event was can-
celled. The court was told that the
company behind it collapsed “into
insolvency”.
Gorham has presented several regu-
lar shows on Radio 1 and filled in for
John Peel, hosting his programme for
weeks after his death in 2004.
Outlining the case against Gorham,
Paul Burton, representing Ticketline,
said the Bestival Group had suffered
“numerous cash flow emergencies”. He
said financial records showed the busi-
ness was in a state of “crisis manage-
ment” as it “lurched
from one near miss to
another”. He told Judge
Alan Johns that on the
first day of the 2018
festival “the group
lacked the funds even
to pay for basic ameni-
ties”. He added: “But
for the injection of
£249,000 from Ticket-
line the whole event
would have been can-
celled.”
Burton said that
Ticketline often ad-
vanced cash to event
organisers to run fes-
tivals, then profited
by taking a cut from
the ticket sales. The
company was “well aware” of Bestival’s
financial problems and when it came
looking for cash in 2016 offered to lend
money to its directors to provide extra
security.
He said Gorham and Hughes had
been left “desperately ringing round in
an attempt to raise funds” and that ulti-
mately Ticketline made two loans.
Burton said only £350,000 of the first
loan was repaid and none of the second,
adding that Ticketline was seeking
£649,000 plus interest. Gorham toldRate of global
warming ‘can
be cut in half ’
Benjamin CookeThe world could cut the rate of global
warming in half, a study has found, if it
focused not just on reducing carbon di-
oxide emissions, but those of other
planet-warming pollutants too.
As well as carbon dioxide, humanity
emits many other pollutants such as
methane, nitrous oxide and soot.
Whereas carbon dioxide remains in
the atmosphere for hundreds of years,
most of these pollutants remain for a far
shorter time. Methane, for instance,
stays in the atmosphere for only 12
years, but while there it has a pound-
for-pound impact on the climate far
greater than carbon dioxide. As such,
efforts to reduce these emissions would
decrease the pace of global warming.
The study, published in the Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences,
a scientific journal, is the first to com-
pare the impact on the climate of only
cutting carbon dioxide with that of a
“dual focus” on these other pollutants.
It found that the “almost exclusive
focus on carbon dioxide cannot by itself
prevent global temperatures from ex-
ceeding 1.5C above pre-industrial
levels, the internationally accepted
guardrail beyond which the world’s cli-
mate is expected to pass irreversible
tipping points. Indeed, such decarboni-
sation would be unlikely to stop tem-
peratures from exceeding even the
much more hazardous 2C limit.”
The study found that focusing exclu-
sively on reducing carbon dioxide emis-
sions could lead to temperatures ex-
ceeding 1.5C by 2035, and 2C by 2050.
Temperatures have already warmed
1.1C since pre-industrial times.
In contrast, if the world were to adopt
a “dual strategy that simultaneously re-
duces emissions of both carbon dioxide
and the other pollutants”, the rate of
warming could be cut in half by 2050.
Efforts have been made to reduce
methane, which is emitted by livestock,
the destruction of wetlands, and fossil
fuel extraction. Last November at the
Cop26 conference, 105 countries
pledged to cut their methane emissions
by 30 per cent by 2030. But according to
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, methane emissions
were 15 per cent higher than the 1984-
2006 average.the court that he had not been heavily
involved in the financial affairs of the
company. “This was a multimillion-
pound, very busy business, with me
driving the customer-facing side and
the artists, a whole raft of things in the
festival world,” he said.
Both Gorham and Hughes are de-
fendants in the litigation but the latter
has admitted liability and has been list-
ed to give evidence for the claimant.
Ticketline has told the court that both
men are jointly and severally liable for
the loans and that the debt can be en-
forced against both or either of them.
The trial continues.Robert Gorham, also known as the DJ
Rob Da Bank, outside court where his
creation Bestival, left, was described
as in a state of crisis management,
going “from one near miss to another”ALAMY; CHAMPION NEWS SERVICEl’