The libel case brought by Sir Martin Sorrell, the marketing tycoon, was like a bowl of spaghetti with “jumbled pieces of evidence” leading nowhere, a High Court judge was told.

Opening the defence case, Andrew Caldecott, QC, said that there was no evidence that linked Marco Benatti and Marco Tinelli, the Italian media consultants, to an internet hate campaign against Sir Martin after he had sacked them.

Lawyers for Sir Martin, the wealthy chief executive of the WPP marketing group, which is worth £7.5 billion, had described the case as a jigsaw puzzle with only one piece missing: evidence of how Mr Tinelli achieved the publication of offensive material.

Mr Caldecott said: “We say, without intending any disrespect to a great national dish, that on true analysis, a bowl of spaghetti Milanese is a better image for the claimants’ case — jumbled pieces of evidence superficially tasty in parts but whose individual strands lead either nowhere or to muddled conclusions or to ends which are simply obscure.”

Both men accepted that an image on the internet of Sir Martin and Daniela Weber, his Swiss colleague with whom he had a personal relationship, was an infringement of their privacy. They accepted that three internet blogs that were disseminated in 2006, two months after Sir Martin had terminated Mr Benatti’s consultancy as country manager in Italy, were libellous.

But, Mr Caldecott told Mr Justice Eady: “In neither case do the claimants have any direct evidence that Mr Benatti or Mr Tinelli did it.”

He conceded that there was some evidence of a “malign presence” within their media consultancy, FullSix.

Sir Martin, 62, is suing Mr Benatti, the founder of FullSix, and Mr Tinelli, its chief executive, over the libellous blogs in which he stood accused of being a Mafia don who was involved in fraud, deception, money laundering and allowing subordinates to go to prison to cover up for his criminal activities. He and Ms Weber, 44, the chief operating officer of WPP Italy, are also suing for invasion of privacy over the internet image — details of which may not be reported.

The defendants, who deny libel and invasion of privacy, do not seek to justify the libels, but deny that they were responsible for disseminating the blogs or the image.

The case concerns the aftermath of a “close friendship” between Mr Benatti and Ms Weber which broke down.

Mr Caldecott said that FullSix, based in Milan, took the stance that if any member of their workforce was responsible for the hate campaign it was highly regrettable and wholly unauthorised. He said that from early January last year Sir Martin had thrown “the kitchen sink in terms of investigative muscle” at the business affairs of Mr Benatti after his dismissal.

Damaging newspaper articles began to associate FullSix and some of its directors with the tycoon’s investigation.

Mr Tinelli reacted to the “collateral damage” that this caused by sending an e-mail to Sir Martin in March last year that expressed his concern for his company’s survival.

Mr Caldecott said that Desmond Browne, QC, counsel for Sir Martin, had referred to the case as “Goliath and Goliath” but that in terms of the respective parties, “the contest resembles the biblical story rather than Mr Browne’s rewriting of it”. He asked what FullSix could possibly gain by “climbing into the ring” with Sir Martin and WPP.

On the same day that an unidentified person was preparing the image, Mr Tinelli sent an e-mail to his staff that advocated positive counter-measures, though he did include a “rude” phrase that labelled Sir Martin and Ms Weber as “the mad dwarf and the nympho schizo”.

“One of the frequent themes in this case is the way in which people depicted as those trying to conceal their involvement in this affair suddenly veer from being brilliant Professor Mori-arty to Inspector Clouseau in a matter of minutes,” Mr Caldecott said. He added there was evidence of a “malign presence” within FullSix, as shown by an e-mail that was highly damaging to the company’s interests and which was sent from within the organisation to major companies last May.

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