Cash-strapped Jackson misses out on damages

The owner of a Los Angeles-based celebrity jet service has been ordered to pay $20.25m in compensation to two of Michael Jackson's former lawyers after secretly video-taping them and the pop star on a flight from Las Vegas to California in 2003. Jackson was flying into Santa Barbara to turn himself in to face the child molestation charges of which he was eventually acquitted.

Jeffrey Borer, owner of Xtrajet, was found out after Fox News was approached in November 2003 by someone offering to sell tapes of Jackson talking on the plane with his lawyer Mark Geragos and associate Pat Harris. Borer pleaded guilty to federal charges and received a six-month home detention sentence. Geragos called the invasion of privacy one "one of the most outrageous acts I've seen in my 20 years of practising criminal law".

Jackson will be kicking himself that he pulled out of the lawsuit against Xtrajet after firing Geragos as his lead attorney in the 2004 molestation case. Jackson could have done with the money to help pay off the $25m mortgage arrears on his Neverland ranch.

Borer, whose jet service has since gone bankrupt, made the headlines last year when the Los Angeles Times discovered he had managed to turn his home detention 'sentence' into a holiday, by serving it not at home but at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Marina del Rey. After persuading a court that his house was infested with mold, to which his wife was allergic, Borer was allowed to say at the Ritz Carlton - for six months at his own expense.