Prince Harry and six others who lost a privacy case against the publisher of the Daily Mail have been ordered to pay its legal costs, and the BBC reports the figure could run to £34.5m. An initial £9.54m is due to Associated Newspapers Limited by Friday of next week.
The seven are the Duke of Sussex, Sir Elton John and his husband David Furnish, the former Liberal Democrat deputy leader Sir Simon Hughes, the racial justice campaigner Baroness Lawrence, and the actresses Sadie Frost and Liz Hurley. Mr Justice Nicklin dismissed their claims of unlawful information-gathering on 7 July; ANL had denied them. They have until 2 October to try to launch an appeal.
The £34.5m is not the sum they are likely to pay. The claimants had insurance covering up to £16.2m of the publisher's costs in the event of losing, which the BBC reports leaves them facing a bill of some £18m.
What made the order unusual is that the judge required the seven to pay far more than the costs agreed before trial, criticising the way they had presented their claims as unreasonable to a high degree. He also ordered that ANL's costs be assessed on an indemnity basis, which is more favourable to the publisher in what it can recover, except where orders had already been made.
He was not uncritical of the publisher's number either. A claim for costs in excess of £34 million was, on its face, excessive, he said, and gave rise to real concerns about whether all of it had been reasonably incurred and was reasonable in amount. But he decided not to impose a ceiling on what ANL can recover — that would be too broad-brush, he said, would risk unfairness, and would be vulnerable to the charge that it was arbitrary.
What he returned to was what the claimants had left standing. He called it striking that not a single allegation of serious wrongdoing had been voluntarily withdrawn by the group. That matters, he said: serious allegations of criminality or grave impropriety cannot properly be left hanging over individuals in that way.
Why it is on the board
Top of the BBC's most-read list when we collected, fifth on Google Trends in the band above ten thousand searches, and running on video as well — all three lens types we have for Britain, which is the strongest reading this board has recorded for a British story.
확인: BBC