Rebekah Vardy has launched an appeal bid against a recent ruling on Coleen Rooney’s legal costs, in the latest development of the so-called Wagatha Christie battle.
Lawyers for the two women returned to the High Court last month in a dispute over legal costs claimed by Mrs Rooney, 90% of which Mrs Vardy had been ordered to pay in an earlier ruling.
In a three-day hearing in early October, lawyers for Mrs Vardy argued the sum of Mrs Rooney’s costs should be reduced due to what they said was “serious misconduct” by Mrs Rooney’s legal team.
But 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.
Therefore, he said, it was “not an appropriate case” to reduce the amount of money that Mrs Vardy should pay.
New court documents show that Mrs Vardy has now launched an appeal bid, which her lawyers Kingsley Napley confirmed to the PA news agency related to the misconduct ruling.
BBC News has asked Mrs Rooney’s legal representatives for comment on Mrs Vardy’s request to appeal.
Mrs Vardy, the wife of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, lost the original Wagatha Christie court battle in 2022.
She had mounted the legal action after Mrs Rooney, the wife of Manchester United striker Wayne, publicly accused Mrs Vardy of leaking private information about her to the press.
Mrs Vardy sued her for libel, but Mrs Justice Steyn found in July 2022 that the allegation was “substantially true”.
The judge later ordered Mrs Vardy to pay 90% of Mrs Rooney’s costs, including an initial payment of £800,000.
The previous hearing in London was told that Mrs Rooney’s claimed legal bill – £1,833,906.89 – was more than three times her “agreed costs budget of £540,779.07”.
Mrs Vardy’s lawyer Jamie Carpenter KC argued that was “disproportionate”.
He claimed that Mrs Rooney’s legal team had committed misconduct by understating some of her costs so she could “use the apparent difference in incurred costs thereby created to attack the other party’s costs”, which was “knowingly misleading”.
Robin Dunne, for Mrs Rooney, said that “there has been no misconduct” and that it was “illogical to say that we misled anyone”.
He added that the argument that the amount owed should be reduced was “misconceived” and that the budget was “not designed to be an accurate or binding representation” of her overall legal costs.
Judge Gordon-Saker ruled that while there was a “failure to be transparent”, it was not “sufficiently unreasonable or improper” to constitute misconduct.
He ordered Mrs Vardy to pay Mrs Rooney a further £100,000 ahead of the full amount owed being decided at a later date.