Decision expected on Mosley privacy case next week

A ruling is expected next week in motorsport Max Mosley's groundbreaking privacy case at the High Court.

Mr Justice Eady, sitting in London, reserved his decision on the fifth day of the hearing, following closing speeches by QCs for Mr Mosley and the News of the World, which has hotly contested the action.

The judge announced that he hoped to be able to give his decision "in the middle of next week".

Mr Mosley, the 68-year-old son of the 1930s Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, says that his life was devastated by the newspaper's expose in March of his encounter at a London flat with five women, which it described as a "sick Nazi orgy".

Mr Mosley, who has been present throughout the hearing, is asking for an unprecedented award of punitive exemplary damages.

His counsel, James Price QC, has said that the "gross and indefensible intrusion" was made substantially worse by the entirely false suggestion that Mr Mosley, president of the FIA (Federation Internationale de l'Automobile) was playing a concentration camp commandant and a cowering death camp inmate.

The newspaper's editor, Colin Myler, has said that he believed the story was one of "legitimate public interest and one that I believe was legitimately published".