her private island, is trying to make her pay almost all of his legal bills.

Mr. DeGroote has already won a Supreme Court ruling that Mrs. MacMillan should stick by a 1990 agreement to sell Perot's Island to him for $8.5 million.

Mrs. MacMillan had changed her mind about the sale. She now wants to set up a psychological counselling centre on the island, and an appeal against her opponent's victory is expected to go ahead next year.

Last May, Supreme Court judge the Hon. Mr. Justice Ground said the businessman might have won the case much earlier had it not been for a sworn statement made by Mrs. MacMillan which was "regrettably false'' in four areas concerning Betco, her real estate firm.

Yesterday Mr. DeGroote's lawyer, Mr. John Riihiluoma, told Mr. Justice Ground that Mrs. MacMillan should pay all her opponent's "reasonable'' costs.

It is understood this would mean Mr. DeGroote getting almost all of his costs back, instead of only about a quarter of them.

The total amount spent on the case by Mr. DeGroote and the real estate firms also involved has been estimated at more than $400,000.

Mr. Riihiluoma said he was asking for costs on an "indemnity'' basis from December 24, 1991, the date Mrs. MacMillan made the sworn statement.

If that "untrue'' statement had not been made, Mr. DeGroote would have won in December, 1991 and avoided a "vast amount of costs'', as well as "aggravation and hardship''.

Mrs. MacMillan's case had kept shifting, and trying to pin it down had been like "trying to nail mercury to the wall''.

Mr. Riihiluoma went back to the official colonisation of Bermuda in 1612 in an attempt to show the court had authority to make such a decision on costs.

Mr. Mark Diel, for Betco, said he was asking for more than Mr. Riihiluoma. His client had been an "innocent party'' in the case, subject to "serious and wholly unfounded claims''.

He was asking that Betco not be out of pocket by a single penny. It is believed the other realtors involved in the case, Coopers, have come to an agreement on costs.

Mr. Julian Hall, for Mrs. MacMillan, told the court she had not been dishonest, and that this had been recognised by Mr. Justice Ground.

He will argue against the applications by Mr. DeGroote and Betco today.

Cargill, the firm run by Mrs. MacMillan's family, was this week named America's largest private company.

The business magazine Forbes described the firm as a $47.1 billion marketer of agricultural products.