“Lying … that is what happened here,” Mr Justice Max Barrett said last December when imposing a punitive costs order on the bloodstock billionaire John Magnier. The judge rejected as “entirely false” the evidence given by the businessman in his showdown with the Thomson-Moores, the family that owned the historic Barne Estate, near Magnier’s Coolmore Stud in Co Tipperary. That dispute was put to bed. Magnier had not sealed a €15 million handshake deal to buy Barne, the court found. Instead, waiting in the wings, was US-based JT Magen construction magnate Maurice Regan. Regan had placed the highest bid and…

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