Seven West Media’s chair, Kerry Stokes, has been ordered to pay $13.5m in legal costs to companies who were unsuccessfully sued for defamation by disgraced former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith .

On Tuesday, a federal court registrar ordered that Australian Capital Equity Pty Ltd (ACE), Stokes’ private company, pay costs fixed at almost $13.3m, and a further $225,000 in relation to the costs assessment, bringing the total bill to $13.5m.

In June 2023, Roberts-Smith, a recipient of the Victoria Cross, failed in his defamation case against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times.

He alleged reports from 2018 defamed him as a war criminal. Justice Anthony Besanko found the newspapers successfully proved – to the civil standard of the balance of probabilities – that Roberts-S

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