Stephen Roche's appeal over case related to cycling business partially upheld

Irish cycling hero Stephen Roche’s appeal against a damning court ruling following the collapse of his Spanish firm has been partially upheld.

The 1987 Tour de France winner was ordered to repay nearly €750,000 in April 2022 after a judge blasted him for “knowingly and negligently” bankrupting his Majorca-based cycling tourism business by plundering it to finance a luxury lifestyle.

On Wednesday, it emerged the 64-year-old Dundrum, Co Dublin-born dad-of-four had failed to convince appeal judges the earlier court decision to find him at fault for Shamrock Events SL going bust was not the correct one.

They confirmed the insolvency was rightfully declared “culpable” and not “fortuitous".

But in a partial win for the former professional road racer, the three Palma-based judges ruled he should repay the cash he took out of his firm for only the two years prior to it going into administration in April 2019.

Mr Roche’s lawyers had claimed nearly €350,000 of the six-figure sum he had initially been told to hand over following the April 2022 judgement should be excluded from the repayment order because it related to pre-April 2017 “asset stripping".

The final figure the ex-cyclist will have to repay has yet to be calculated but is now expected to be around €380,000 instead of the previous €733,866.

Mr Roche also got his seven-year company director ban reduced to two on appeal.

The appeal judges ruled in a 33-page document they had found no evidence to support the former cyclist’s claims he had done anything to justify his expenditure of cash he took out of his bankrupted company.

They confirmed: “In this case the insolvency has been declared culpable because of the absence of accounts, the breach of duty in asking for the company