Seven West Media’s chair, Kerry Stokes, has been ordered to pay $13.5m in legal costs to companies who were unsuccessfully sued for defamation by disgraced former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith.
On Tuesday, a federal court registrar ordered that Australian Capital Equity Pty Ltd (ACE), Stokes’ private company, pay costs fixed at almost $13.3m, and a further $225,000 in relation to the costs assessment, bringing the total bill to $13.5m.
In June 2023, Roberts-Smith, a recipient of the Victoria Cross, failed in his defamation case against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times.
He alleged reports from 2018 defamed him as a war criminal. Justice Anthony Besanko found the newspapers successfully proved – to the civil standard of the balance of probabilities – that Roberts-Smith was complicit in the murder of four unarmed civilians while serving in the SAS in Afghanistan, as well as bullying and threatening colleagues, and intimidating a woman with whom he was having an affair.
The court order regarding the legal costs came five days after the high court ruled it would not hear an appeal by Roberts-Smith, and the federal court ruled Stokes would have to pay the media companies legal costs.
The former special forces soldier had appealed a decision by the full bench of the federal court in May to uphold Besanko’s judgment.
The total costs of the proceedings had been estimated at between $30m and $40m.
Roberts-Smith has consistently denied all wrongdoing.
In 2015, Roberts-Smith was appointed general manager of Seven Queensland, a role he resigned from after the verdict was handed down in his defamation case.
The ex-soldier had stood aside from his job in 2021 to focus on the trial.
Stokes backed Roberts-Smith financially and publicly, insisting his employee was innocent.
At Seven West Media’s annual general meeting in 2022, Stokes said: “Ben Roberts-Smith is innocent and deserves legal representation and that scumbag journalists should be held to account. And quote me on that.”