Rebekah Vardy has been ordered to pay Coleen Rooney £100,000 this month towards the money she owes following the high-profile 2022 Wagatha Christie libel case.
After losing the case, Mrs Vardy was ordered to pay 90% of Mrs Rooney’s legal costs.
At the trial, the judge ruled it was “substantially true” that Mrs Vardy had leaked Mrs Rooney’s private information to the press.
Barristers for the pair have been back at the High Court this week in a dispute over the costs, which were originally agreed at £540,779 – but have ended up being £1.8m, more than three times that figure.
Mrs Vardy’s lawyers launched a new case arguing that Mrs Rooney has no entitlement to £120,000 of the costs, and that her lawyers committed misconduct by “deliberately” understating her legal bill during the 2022 case.
Disputes were raised over costs for one of Mrs Rooney’s lawyers, with claims that they had stayed at a luxury hotel and run up a large mini-bar bill.
But in a ruling on Tuesday, senior costs judge Andrew Gordon-Saker dismissed a number of Mrs Vardy’s claims and ruled that Mrs Rooney’s team had not committed any misconduct, and therefore it was “not an appropriate case” to reduce the amount Mrs Vardy had to pay.
He said that while there was a “failure to be transparent”, it was not “sufficiently unreasonable or improper” to constitute misconduct.
However, it is likely that Mrs Vardy will pay less than the estimated £1.6m she was instructed to pay, because the case is set to return to court next year for a line-by-line assessment, with some rulings yet to be made.
On Tuesday, Mr Gordon-Saker ruled that some of the hourly fees charged by Mrs Rooney’s lawyers had been too high.
Jamie Carpenter, representing Mrs Vardy, said that “we simply don’t know at the moment how much is in this bill that shouldn’t be”, but there were certainly costs that “shouldn’t” be there.
At the end of the hearing on Wednesday, Mr Gordon-Saker said the case would return to court by next spring at the earliest.
He added: “The parties need to get on with this and put it behind them.”
Mrs Rooney’s lawyer, Robin Dunne, requested a further payment towards the bill. He said Mrs Vardy had paid £800,000 so far, as ordered following the 2022 ruling, and requested an additional £150,000 to £200,000.
Mr Gordon-Saker ordered Mrs Vardy to pay a further £100,000 within 21 days.
He said: “I think there is some scope for a further payment on account so the defendant [Mrs Rooney] is not kept out of her costs, and I think that should be no more than £100,000.”
This marks the end of a set of preliminary issues.
The line-by-line assessment of costs will decide the total amount of money to be paid.
It has been five years since Mrs Rooney, the wife of ex-England and Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney, claimed on social media that Mrs Vardy’s account had been the source of three stories in the Sun.
At the trial in July 2022, Mrs Justice Steyn ruled it was likely Mrs Vardy “knew of, condoned and was actively engaged” in the process of leaking stories about Mrs Rooney to the newspaper in collaboration with her agent, Caroline Watt.
