Liam Payne’s close friend has spoken to the star’s rumoured threesome and prostitutes as well as the £8.1million lawsuit he is planning against Liam’s father.
Argentinian businessman Rogelio Nores admitted his close pal had asked him for drugs just like he did another ’40 million people’ at times but he never gave him what he wanted.
‘It was impossible to think everything was going to end the way it did,’ Mr Nores said of Liam’s drink and drug-fuelled October 16, 2024, Buenos Aires hotel plunge. ‘When he was like that, Liam would ask 40 million people for drugs. He asked me, but I never gave him anything. I never tried drugs. But he managed to get them.’
These were Mr Nores first comments since Argentinian public prosecutors said they were considering fighting an appeal court decision to drop negligent manslaughter charges against him.
He also addressed Liam’s reported final hours with two prostitutes he hired for a threesome. The women claimed the singer had downed whisky and consumed a ‘crystal-like’ drug.
‘Those last three days I saw him little. Liam had a lot of energy but he wasn’t in a bad way,’ Mr Nores told Argentinian daily La Nacion.
Recalling the last time he saw Liam alive after he intervened to try to resolve an argument about money the singer had with the two sex workers he hired, Mr Nores said: ‘I went to the hotel and Liam told me to leave, saying the problem was his.
‘Until that moment he was fine, as is clear from the hotel CCTV footage.’
He added: ‘Then he met with a hotel employee and came down all over the place, agitated. He tried to escape. And then they called me… It was horrible, the world stopped.’
Mr Nores said last month he was ‘very happy’ after it emerged manslaughter charges had been sensationally dropped against him.
This come after appeal court judges accepted he was just a friend of Liam’s who was helping him with his business affairs and not his agent with responsibility for keeping him off drugs.
A lower court judge charged him late last year along with two hotel workers accused of the same crime of negligent manslaughter, Esteban Grassi and Gilda Martín.
Public prosecutors announced last week they were considering appealing the decision to drop the manslaughter charges against all three men.
Two suspects accused of selling Liam cocaine, former waiter Braian Nahuel Paiz and suspended hotel worker Ezequiel David Pereyra, are still in prison following their failed appeals and have been told they face continued prosecution.
Mr Nores appeared unconcerned about a future appeal as he told La Nacion in his first comments since the public prosecution statement when asked about the decision to charge him: ‘Everything’s over. We left it behind.
‘I have no right to victimise myself, there are worse things in life.’
Mr Nores has been previously quoted as saying he will continue his £8.1 million separate US defamation lawsuit against Liam’s grieving father Geoff unless he gets an apology.
He claims Geoff Payne made ‘false’ statements to Argentinian prosecutors following the singer’s death.
But in his interview with La Nacion, the businessman appeared to offer him an olive branch, saying of Geoff’s prosecution statement which is understood to have played an important part in judge Laura Bruniard’s decision to charge him with negligent manslaughter late last year: ‘Liam’s dad was trying to move on from his son’s death in the best way he could.
‘He was suffering, he didn’t understand what he was saying.’
He continued: ‘It’s logical that people look for a culprit to make the case interesting. They were looking for someone to blame. I understand… We knew all hell would break loose if something happened to him, but I wasn’t afraid of going to jail.
‘You’re left with a sensation of helplessness. You ask yourself ‘How could I do nothing to save him? How could I not help him out of this!’
Mr Nores’ Argentinian lawyer Rafael Cuneo Libarona, who is also involved in the separate US defamation case, had centred his fight to get his client off his manslaughter rap on a rebuttal of prosecution claims he was Liam’s representative and had failed in his duty of care towards him.
The prosecutors confirmed the appeal court judges had based their decision to clear Liam’s friend of any criminal wrongdoing on the fact he had not assumed ‘special obligations’ that could link his conduct to Liam’s death.
The other two men told they were in the clear following an appeal hearing are Esteban Grassi, the chief receptionist at CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires who made a 911 call moments before Liam died, and its head of security Gilda Martin.
Grassi was one of the three men identified alongside Martin in the last harrowing photo of the former One Direction singer to emerge showing him being carried back up to his room from his hotel lobby shortly before his balcony plunge.
Like Mr Nores they would have faced between one and five years in prison if convicted as charged although they had been told they could be eligible for suspended jail sentences.
The two men facing drug charges have been warned they could face between four and 15 years in prison on conviction.
Details of Liam’s final hours were documented in the 35-page ruling by three judges sitting in Chamber Four of Argentina’s Criminal and Correctional Court in Buenos Aires, to explain their decision to drop charges against Mr Nores and the two hotel workers.
Sex workers Aldana Serrano and Lucila Goitea, who left the hotel just before Liam’s fatal plunge, were questioned as witnesses but never charged with any crime.