Trinity Mirror has been granted permission to appeal the £1.2m in payouts made to eight victims of phone hacking by its Mirror titles.
Trinity said an appeal by its Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) subsidiary, which publishes the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People would be “heard as soon as reasonably possible” by the Court of Appeal.
Trinity was initially refused permission to appeal the settlements for victims including Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne, which were expected to set a precedent for future payouts.
Frost alone was awarded £260,250 in what is believed to be the single biggest privacy damages payout since the phone-hacking scandal broke in 2010.
At the time, more than 70 high-profile claimants said they would sue the papers.
In May, Trinity increased the amount it had set aside to cover the costs of settling the civil claims over phone hacking from £12m to £28m.
Earlier this month, Trinity chief executive Simon Fox told the Guardian that the company wanted to “make the right payments to the civil claimants”, but that the judge in the case had “got it wrong” on their scale, adding: “That’s why we are appealing. We hope that process will occur as quickly as possible.”
