Disgraced Grobbelaar ordered to pay 'The Sun' £1m legal costs

The former Liverpool and Southampton goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar was ordered to pay more than £1m in legal costs yesterday in the final twist of his ill-fated campaign to clear his name of bribery allegations.

Law lords ruled that Mr Grobbelaar, who has spent eight years fighting allegations by The Sun that he took bribes to fix matches, should reimburse the newspaper for two-thirds of its costs.

Mr Grobbelaar was awarded £85,000 in August 1999, when a High Court jury found the newspaper had libelled him five years earlier in articles that contained the match- fixing allegations. The verdict was quashed by the Court of Appeal in January last year and the damages stripped away when the court found there had been a "miscarriage of justice".

He took his case to the House of Lords, which reinstated the original jury verdict but last month awarded damages of £1. The law lords who heard the case said that although it had been proved that Mr Grobbelaar had accepted bribes, the paper had failed to show he had actually let in goals to fix matches.

Four of a panel of five law lords said in their ruling that he had acted in a way in which no decent or honest footballer would act and which any right-thinking person would condemn.

Lord Bingham, who led the panel, said it would be "an affront to justice" if substantial damages were give to "a man shown to have acted in such flagrant breach of his legal and moral obligations". Yesterday the House of Lords ordered Mr Grobbelaar, who lives with his wife and two daughters in West Sussex, to pay The Sun two-thirds of its legal costs.

Daniel Taylor, solicitor for News International, which publishes The Sun, said: "By awarding costs in favour of The Sun, the House of Lords has sent a clear message to litigants who bring libel actions on a false basis that they may face a huge bill at the end of the action, as well as having their reputations destroyed."