Joe Hockey awarded $200,000 against Fairfax

[mantra]

In the Federal Court today, Justice White ordered that Fairfax pay no more than 15 per cent of Mr Hockey's recoverable costs.

So who's going to pay the other 85%? Us?

[boxy]

Big Joe has to pay for it... he may be able to garner some donations towards it from people looking for visas to be approved

[IQS.RLOW]

You would think that the Fauxfacts board would have had enough of that fuckwit Goodsir handing out shareholders money like candy so he can display his useless fuckwittery and have a swing and a miss at Hockey and piss another half a mil at an innocent camel humper who they mistook for a terrorist, because you know, those progressives think all Arabs look alike.

[boxy]

Hope he's better at cost-benefit calculations when he's using taxpayer money

[Andrew Bolt]

Suing Fairfax for defaming him turns out to have been a very expensive mistake for the Treasurer:

Fairfax Media has been ordered to pay 15 per cent of Joe Hockey’s legal costs incurred during a year-long defamation battle over publications that claimed he was “for sale”.

This ruling is likely to leave the Treasurer substantially out of pocket, even accounting for the $200,000 he was awarded by the Federal Court in damages last month, and another $7000 in interest.

His legal costs are estimated to have run into the many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Federal Court judge Richard White last month awarded Mr Hockey $200,000 in damages after finding that a Sydney Morning Herald poster and tweets from The Age Twitter account promoting a series of articles with the words “Treasurer for sale” were defamatory…

Fairfax last week argued the case had been an “unmitigated disaster” for Mr Hockey and he should be ordered to pay 60 per cent of Fairfax’s legal costs.

Its barrister argued this was because Fairfax had won “the core” issue of the case — namely, whether its news articles, rather than the poster and tweets promoting them, were defamatory… Today, Justice White agreed with Fairfax that the articles were “the real core” of the trial…

Under an ordinary costs award, a successful plaintiff is able to recover up to about 70 per cent of their legal costs. Mr Hockey will be able to recover only 15 per cent of this portion.

The Government’s week just got worse.