Coleen Rooney’s lawyers did not commit misconduct, a judge has ruled, after Rebekah Vardy accused her of “deliberately” understating her legal costs during the 2020 Wagatha libel trial.
Mrs Vardy lost that case after a judge ruled it was “substantially true” she had leaked Mrs Rooney’s private information to the press, and was ordered to pay 90% of Mrs Rooney’s costs.
The original cost estimate was £540k – it now stands at £1.8m.
Barristers for Mrs Rooney and Mrs Vardy have now returned to the High Court in a dispute over how much should pay.
In a ruling on Tuesday, senior costs judge Andrew Gordon-Saker found “on balance and, I have to say, only just”, that Mrs Rooney’s legal team had not committed wrongdoing.
He said it was therefore “not an appropriate case” to reduce the amount of money that Mrs Vardy should pay.
He added that while there was a “failure to be transparent”, it was not “sufficiently unreasonable or improper” to constitute misconduct.
Mrs Vardy’s barrister, Jamie Carpenter KC, had claimed in written submissions that Mrs Rooney had “deliberately misled” Mrs Vardy and the court with previous estimates of how much money and time she had spent on the case, which he claimed was “serious misconduct”.
He argued that this should lead to a reduction in the amount of money Mrs Vardy has to pay, but the judge disagreed.
