British broadcaster Katie Hopkins, who has spoken out against Muslims in the past, is reported to have applied for an insolvency agreement.
Ms Hopkins, 43, is seeking to avoid bankruptcy after she was ordered to pay £24,000 (Dh116,000) in damages to British food writer Jack Monroe last year, plus £107,000 (Dh515,000) in legal costs following a libel case for tweets which implied she backed the defacement of war memorials by protesters.
Ms Monroe tweeted that Ms Hopkins had entered an insolvency arrangement, known as an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), to pay off her debts.
A former contestant in British TV show The Apprentice, Ms Hopkins was regularly criticised for her controversial columns for the Mail Online and in 2016 the media organisation had to pay out £150,000 to a British Muslim family after she falsely accused them of extremism.
She left the newspaper website in 2017, the same year that she was filmed giving a speech at an event organised by far-right American think-tank the David Horowitz Freedom Center in which she attacked Muslims.
Hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition for her to be sacked during her stint as a columnist for UK tabloid newspaper The Sun in 2015 when she said gunships should be used to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean, and voiced other controversial views on migrants.
____________
Read more:
Far-right British columnist Katie Hopkins dropped by Mail Online
____________
She was reported to police after the Manchester Arena terror attack in 2016 when she tweeted a call for a "final solution" - a term used by the Nazis for the Holocaust. She later deleted the tweet and rephrased it but was still sacked from her job at London’s LBC radio.
Earlier this year she joined far-right Canadian website Rebel Media, where she claims to be "serious about telling the truths not being told". In February, she confirmed on Twitter that she was detained at an airport in South Africa having been accused of "spreading racial hatred".
Hopkins has had to sell her UK home, according to The Guardian as a result of the libel case with Ms Monroe. The insolvency agreement was formally agreed recently following discussions with creditors.
She is yet to comment on the reports of the IVA.
