Gabby and Kenny Logan receive damages over false tax avoidance claims

Gabby Logan is known for fronting BBC football, athletics, rugby and other sports coverage

TV host Gabby Logan and her husband will receive "substantial" damages after the Mail Online falsely reported they had been paid to promote a tax avoidance scheme to celebrity friends.

Logan and her partner Kenny, an ex-rugby player, threatened to sue the Mail's publisher Associated Newspapers after the story appeared in February.

The company later retracted the story.

The couple have also received damages from an accountant who was quoted in it and former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie.

Jonathan Coad, a solicitor for the Logans, told the PA news agency the total "amounts to six figures".

The original story claimed the couple had received £500,000 commission for promoting the tax avoidance scheme.

And Gwilym Jones, the director of a litigation investment company, was quoted claiming the couple had tried to disguise the commission as loans to avoid paying tax on it.

'Serious harm and distress'

"These allegations were wholly untrue, as the Mail Online has now acknowledged," papers filed at the High Court on Friday said.

The legal documents also said Mr Jones' claim "caused serious harm and distress to... Gabby and Kenny Logan".

Mr Jones "repeatedly refused to retract the false and seriously defamatory allegations", but "eventually accepted" a settlement offer and paid damages after the Logans launched legal action, the filing said.

After the story was published, Mr Mackenzie posted a tweet calling the couple's alleged behaviour "shocking". He has now deleted the tweet and also paid damages.

The court papers said: "Although Kenny was a brand ambassador for a company that sold financial products which included tax avoidance schemes and earned commission for making introductions, neither Gabby nor Kenny Logan ever promoted tax avoidance schemes, either to their celebrity friends or to anyone else.

"Still less did they admit to so doing. Neither did they receive commission of £500,000 for this alleged activity."

The case comes nine years after Gabby Logan admitted being part of a tax avoidance scheme, but said she had invested in "good faith" believing it was "a way of funding new acts in the music industry" and vowed to repay any tax she owed.