The second item in the SMH’s business column says Macquarie Radio Network continues to tally the cost of Alan Jones’s defamation of the Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates.
Having paid out $388,563 in damages (including interest) over Jones’s defamation of Coates in relation to an incident at the 2004 Athens Olympics involving the rower Sally Robbins, 2GB has yet to find out how much it may have to pay for Coates’s legal bills.
Yesterday it was disclosed $580,654 had already been paid by the AOC to Coates’s solicitors. This is nearly triple Macquarie Radio’s $222,000 net profit from last financial year.