British Court Orders Michael Bisping To Pay Ex-Manager Big Money

It’s been a rough two months for former UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping. On Friday, he took another hit.

He suffered a devastating loss to Georges St-Pierre at UFC 217 for the middleweight title. Then, he was brutally knocked out by Gastelum in the very first round by Kelvin Gastelum at UFC Shanghai.

He has been involved in a long-running lawsuit with ex-manager Anthony McGann. After going to court, he was ordered to pay the Wolfslair founder over $400,000 after a long-running trial.

The issues between them even saw a “scuffle.” They met in 2005, which was just prior to Bisping’s long UFC run.

McGann alleged that he was owed a substantial portion of Bisping’s earnings from 2005 to 2011, and the judge ultimately agreed, awarding him more than £320,000 British pounds – about $426,000 USD.

Courtesy of the Manchester Evening News quotes from the judge revealed that he was clearly not enamored with either man.

“McGann had “greatly exaggerated” his claim against the fighter and “put forward false documents and false evidence”, said the judge. But, in a damning decision, he said McGann’s evidence in court ‘varied between the aggressive and the obsequious.’

‘In a number of respects his evidence was, in my judgment, plainly untruthful,’ the judge added.

Bisping was a ‘more straightforward witness’ but, like McGann, he was guilty of ‘tailoring and trimming his evidence to suit his case’.

Parts of his evidence were ‘incredible and untrue’ and his description of facilities at the Wolfslair gym, in Widnes, was ‘a confected story’.”

The judge also stated that the two men almost certainly inflated Bisping’s expenses for two of the years, allowing him to “defraud” the Australian government in terms of taxes.