Former Cabinet minister Chris Huhne faces even bigger bill after appeal bid to get legal costs cut for speeding points scandal fails

 
Appeal: Chris Huhne (Picture: PA)
Paul Cheston28 October 2014
WEST END FINAL

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Disgraced former Cabinet minister Chris Huhne today failed in his attempt to have his legal costs cut for the speeding points scandal - and landed himself with an even bigger bill.

Huhne, 60, had been ordered to pay 77,750 to the prosecution after he pleaded guilty to perverting he course of justice last year.

This was on top of his own legal costs amounting to around 250,000.

Now after his appeal failed he was ordered to pay a further 1,279 prosecution costs and his own bill for the hearing which could be as much as 10,000.

Lord Justice Davis, sitting with two other senior judges, dismissed the claims of Huhne's lawyers that the 77,000 costs order was "unjust and unreasonable."

The judge said that Mr Justice Sweeney, who had also jailed Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce for eight months each for perverting the course of justice, was perfectly entitled to make the order.

Richard Wormald, representing Huhne who was not in the Court of Appeal for the hearing, said the former Energy Secretary had been treated unfairly.

He said the police should have investigated earlier Pryce's friend Carmen Briscoe - the judge herself later jailed for her part in the scandal - which would have saved costs.

Mr Wormald also said Huhne should have been warned by the prosecution about rising costs and Pryce - who had been ordered to pay 49,000 herself - should have paid a bigger proportion.

Oliver Glasgow, for the Crown, told the court Huhne had "taken a gamble knowing that if he had lost it would cost him dearly."

He added: "Had Huhne chosen to enter a guilty plea earlier than he did the costs ultimately bourn by him would never have been incurred."

Huhne, then an MEP, had been caught speeding on the M11 near Standsted airport in March 2003.

Pryce, then his wife, agreed to claim to have been the driver and take the penalty on her licence to save him from a driving ban.

In 2012 Pryce tried to expose her ex husband in the newspapers after he had dumped her for pR consultant Carina Trimingham.

But she too was charged with perverting the course of justice and convicted after a retrial.

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