Jones wins $104k in defamation case

Jury agrees newspaper article suggested property investor behaved dishonourably

Wellington property investor Sir Robert Jones was yesterday awarded $104,000 after a jury found he was defamed in a newspaper article that suggested he inflated his investment company's assets to increase his management fee.

Sir Robert won his action in the High Court at Wellington against the article's author, Kapiti Coast investment adviser Chris Lee.

They jury found in his favour after five hours of deliberations at the end of the week-long trial. Sir Robert had been seeking up to $800,000 in damages.

The article, published in the Wellington community paper City Life in April 2007, criticised incentive-based management contracts, using a contract between Robert Jones Holdings and Robt Jones Investments in the late 1980s as an example.

Sir Robert said the article suggested he had become rich from inflating his investment company's assets to increase his management fee.

The article incorrectly said the investment company paid 8 per cent of its gross assets to the holding company as a management fee. The fee was actually 8 per cent of its gross income.

The jury retired about 11am to consider its verdict, before returning at 3.45pm to ask Justice Denis Clifford for clarification over a point of law.

Aside from determining whether the article was defamatory and deciding what damages should be awarded, the jury was also required to determine if Mr Lee was motivated by ill will or had exercised improper advantage in publishing the story, and the jury sought further explanation from Justice Clifford on how to decide this point.

It returned again at 4.15pm finding in favour of Sir Robert on two of eight issues it was asked to consider.

The issues related to the meanings readers would take from the words in the article. The jury found the words meant Sir Robert behaved dishonourably, dishonestly or unethically and had ripped off shareholders, and the meanings were defamatory.

The jury determined Sir Robert should be paid $104,000 in damages.

Mr Lee was also found by the jury to have been motivated by ill-will towards Sir Robert, or to have taken improper advantage of the occasion of publication.

The article was the second of two articles by Mr Lee that Sir Robert had objected to.

Mr Lee had apologised to Sir Robert after a 2000 article, in which he said Sir Robert had committed a "serious offence" related to his company's operations, which was "totally wrong", Sir Robert's QC, Michael Reed, said.

But Mr Lee's lawyer, Matthew McClelland, said this week that his client would not apologise for the 2007 article because he did not believe he had defamed Sir Robert.

Mr Reed told the court yesterday Sir Robert had been "hurt considerably" by the article. "The article goes to the heart of Sir Robert's business ethics. It goes to his credibility."

The article was published in City Life after agreement between Mr Lee and City Life's general manager Geoff Mead that the paper could use articles from Mr Lee's website without his advance permission or telling him an article would run.

Mr McClelland said that at the time Mr Lee published the article on his website, he believed the information to be true.

Mr Lee told the court he was unaware the allegedly defamatory article had run in City Life.

He later published two corrections on his website, in June and September 2007, but no correction appeared in City Life.

In a statement issued to media outside court yesterday, Mr Lee said he accepted the verdict.

- NZPA