Irish marketing and distribution group DCC will have to pay about 20 per cent of its own legal bill even after successfully defending itself against charges of insider dealing by fruit importer Fyffes.
"Fyffes has been ordered to pay approximately 80 per cent of DCC's costs in addition to Fyffes paying its own costs," DCC said in a statement today after the High Court ruled that the company would have to bear some of the cost.
Fyffes took legal action after DCC sold Fyffes stock a month before a March 2000 profit warning.
It lost its case in December when a judge ruled that information held by DCC chief executive Jim Flavin - a former Fyffes director - was not price sensitive.
The total bill for the litigation for both sides is likely to come in at around €18 million.
Ruling on costs today, Justice Mary Laffoy told the High Court that although Fyffes, having brought the case and lost, might normally have footed the entire bill, DCC also had to take responsibility for prolonging the case.
"The approach adopted by the defendants (DCC) . . . deliberately ignored the reality," Justice Laffoy said after DCC argued during the 87-day trial that it had not dealt in the shares because they were sold by an overseas subsidiary.
"That approach added considerably to the complexity and duration of the case," Justice Laffoy added. "I think it would be fair and just to take that fact into account."
Justice Laffoy said that as a result, DCC would have to foot its own bill for 25 days of court hearings and pay 80 per cent of discovery costs in relation to unearthing data and files relating to the share transactions.
While it is unusual for a defendant who successfully rebuts allegations to pay anything, Laffoy said she had exercised discretion because of the exceptional nature of a case that involved high-level commercial litigation between two publicly listed companies.