The former publishers of the News of the World have failed in their attempt to overturn the £200,000 defamation victory secured by the Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan a decade ago.
Judges at the court of session in Edinburgh rejected the appeal by News Group Newspapers (NGN) to set aside a 2006 civil jury verdict, which the then leader of the Scottish Socialist party won against the newspaper after it printed allegations about his sex life.
Sheridan was subsequently convicted of perjury in 2010 following a police investigation, and served just over a year of his three-year prison sentence. The former MSP has always denied the allegations and launched an unsuccessful attempt to appeal against his conviction.
NGN had argued in the court of session that the civil verdict was unsafe because of Sheridan’s subsequent perjury conviction, but a written summary of opinion issued on Friday by Lady Paton, Lord Drummond Young and Lord McGhie said the reasoning of the 2006 jury had not been not undermined.
The judgment read: “It was noted that the verdict of a civil jury should be treated with considerable respect. Current social standards were very much a jury question.
“The jurors had heard and seen all the witnesses and the written evidence, and were the judges of the facts, deciding questions of credibility and reliability. The jurors would apply the directions in law given by the trial judge.
“Those directions included an instruction that if the jury found that some (but not all) of the allegations made against Mr Sheridan were proved, they still had to assess whether the unproved and unsubstantiated allegations materially injured Mr Sheridan’s reputation.
“Thus it was open to the jury to disbelieve some of Mr Sheridan’s evidence, to find certain evidence led on behalf of NGN established, yet still to conclude that Mr Sheridan had been defamed. Several lines or routes of reasoning had been open to the civil jury, at least one of which was not undermined by the perjury conviction or by the three new items relied upon by NGN.
“In that context, the court felt that certain material (unproved), which seemed to demonstrate unacceptable and possibly illegal conduct on the part of NGN’s staff, should not be ignored. In the result, the civil jury’s verdict and assessment of damages remain unaltered.”
A spokeswoman for News UK, of which NGN is a part, said: “We are disappointed by today’s outcome of our appeal given Mr Sheridan’s criminal conviction for perjury in giving his evidence to the court in the original libel trial. We are now considering all our options.”
In June 2015, the former editor of the News of the World Andy Coulson was cleared of perjury in the high court in Edinburgh after being charged with lying under oath about his knowledge of phone hacking when he appeared as a witness during Sheridan’s 2010 trial.
