Kerry Stokes to pay $30m for Roberts-Smith legal battle
The move by billionaire media mogul Kerry Stokes will stop thousands of confidential emails being made public.
Billionaire media mogul Kerry Stokes has agreed to pay the full costs of Ben Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation case – estimated at more than $30 million – in a backdown that stops thousands of emails between the former soldier’s lawyers and financial backers being made public.
On Monday, lawyers for Mr Stokes said he had agreed to pay the Nine newspapers’ legal costs of at least $16 million after his private company and the Seven network failed to hand over subpoenaed documents on Friday.
Those communications included more than 8600 emails Seven Network commercial director Bruce McWilliam exchanged with Mr Roberts-Smith’s lawyers.
Nine believed the documents would reveal details of Mr Stokes’ agreement to bankroll the Victoria Cross recipient’s defamation case, after Justice Anthony Besanko ruled in June that several allegations of war crimes against Mr Roberts-Smith by the newspapers were substantially true.
The newspapers were seeking to show that Seven and Mr Stokes’ private company, Australian Capital Equity (ACE), exerted significant control over the management of the defamation case, and were not simply observers at the trial.
On Monday Justice Besanko ordered that ACE pay the newspaper’s costs.
Nicholas Owens SC had previously told the court that the 8600 or more emails between Mr McWilliam and Mr Robert Smith’s lawyers “provide a very strong presumption, if one be needed at this stage of the analysis, that there is something more than mere observation going on”.
The vast number of emails “doesn’t mean that because Mr McWilliam was a prolific communicator, that the category becomes burdensome, it simply means there’s a lot to produce,” Mr Owens argued.
The total cost to both sides has been estimated at more than $30 million.
Mr Stokes will have to pay Nine’s costs on an indemnity basis, meaning a much higher proportion than would be payable on a standard basis.
Last month Justice Besanko awarded indemnity costs in part because Mr Roberts-Smith knew what had occurred during missions to the Whiskey 108 compound and the village of Darwan and his case had been directed towards concealing the truth.
Justice Besanko ruled that the VC recipient “knew from the commencement of the proceedings that the most serious imputations were substantially true.”
Handing down his decision in June, Justice Besanko ruled that Mr Roberts-Smith had committed murders of civilians, including of Ali Jan, the farmer kicked off a cliff in the village of Darwan, and the one-legged man dragged from a tunnel at the compound known as Whiskey 108.
The newspapers had alleged that Australia’s most decorated living soldier was complicit in the murder of six unarmed prisoners in Afghanistan, bullied his own colleagues and bashed his former mistress.
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