The lawsuit that four former members of Swedish rockers Ghost enacted against the band’s singer Tobias Forge (a.k.a. Cardinal Copia) may have been thrown out of court in Sweden earlier this fall, but it’s not going away completely just yet.
The musicians — Martin Hjertstedt, Henrik Palm, Mauro Rubino and Simon Söderberg — are asking for a new trial as they claim that Henrik Ibold, the judge in the original case, has a conflict of interest because both he and Forge are members of the Swedish Order of Freemasons.
As reported on Swedish news site NT.se [via Metal Injection], the lawyer for the four men, Michael Berg, wrote in a new filing that “it must almost have been impossible to objectively and impartially assess the probative value of the information that Tobias Forge has provided.”
The original suit claims that Forge entered into a partnership agreement with the four former Nameless Ghouls when they joined the group, making them eligible for a bigger cut of the profits from Ghost’s record sales and concert receipts. Forge responded that there was no such agreement and that the men were paid a salary to perform.
The case was dismissed in October after a six-day trial, with the judge ruling that the four plaintiffs were required to pay Forge’s legal fees to the tune of $146,000 USD. The former Ghost players have stated that they’ve already spent over $300,000 USD on their own court costs.
Ibold, for his part, in a statement to NT.se, said, “I did not know he was a member of the Freemasonry Order. On the other hand, I had heard some rumors that it could be so.”
The current iteration of Ghost is still on tour, promoting their most recent album, Prequelle. The North American leg wraps up on December 15th at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, with dates scheduled to pick back up again in Europe and Australia starting in Lyon, France, on February 3rd. The band will also open for Metallica next year on a massive European trek.
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