Bookies take TV racing supplier to High Court

The high court will host a legal showdown on Thursday, pitting the most powerful forces in horse racing and betting against each other. At the heart of the dispute is whether racecourse owners broke competition law when selling exclusive rights for TV pictures of leading race meets beamed into betting shops.

But the racecourses have launched a counter-claim which will see leading executives from Ladbrokes, William Hill and Betfred take the stand. It is understood that court 73 at the High Court will see print-outs of secret emails between senior betting executives, which could reveal the innermost workings of what is an opaque industry. The trial is expected to last four weeks and each side will rack up £5m in costs.

Until this year, SIS, partly owned by William Hill, Ladbrokes and Betfred, produced pictures of racing for betting shop consumption. The industry was furious when 31 courses, including most of the big ones, such as Cheltenham, Newmarket and York, teamed up with Alphameric, a technology company, to form Turf TV, which demanded that bookies paid for receiving its pictures.

Initially, the industry's big three, William Hill, Ladbrokes and Coral, refused to take the service, only to be forced to cave in when customers moved to shops owned by companies that did.

Gala Coral is the only firm out of the leading betting firms not involved in the action. It accepted pictures from Turf TV earlier than its competitors. It was assumed that the two parties would settle out of court, but two months of mediation failed to find a resolution.