Wouter Vandenhaute, non-executive chairman at Anderlecht.
Anderlecht –
The Brussels court of first instance has rejected the claim for damages from football club RSC Anderlecht against journalist Jan Hauspie. In the judgment, the court states that it cannot avoid the impression that the procedure was at least partly initiated with the intention of intimidating.
Football club Anderlecht had filed a lawsuit against the Humo journalist following two sensational articles that appeared in the weekly magazine last year. Chairman Wouter Vandenhaute was severely put through the wringer in the written documents.
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Hauspie spoke about their remuneration, the way of working within the club and the high staff turnover in recent years. A former employee was also heard who called Wouter Vanderhaute and CEO Peter Verbeke “two psychopaths” and the latter was even nicknamed “le petit Nazi”.
RSCA demanded 25,000 euros against Jan Hauspie because it allegedly suffered damage as a result of the articles, but the court of first instance in Brussels has now completely dismissed that claim. The court states, among other things, that Anderlecht’s lawyers had not made the effort “to substantiate the alleged damage in even the most rudimentary manner”.
“Not the slightest piece of evidence”
“Speaking in this context is, among other things, the gratuitous way in which the claimant (the Anderlecht club, ed.) posits that as a result of the publication of the article in question, she would have suffered material losses in the form of a loss of ‘conspicuous and abnormal many sponsors’ and ‘a striking number of young players’, without presenting even the slightest piece of evidence for this claim, which is easily verifiable, but equally without allowing this to stop them from summarizing their damage on this point in one breath. to be laconically estimated at an amount of ‘ex aequo et bono’ 25,000 euros,” it reads.
The court therefore declared RSC Anderlecht’s claim against Humo-Journalist Jan Hauspie admissible, but rejected it as unfounded.