As Politico note this morning:
Leading Britain journalists have revealed [in the Hiouyse of Commons] how London law firms intimidated journalists on behalf of mega-rich Russians, including harassing them with letters suggesting they were guilty of serious wrongdoing. Tom Burgis, the author of Kleptopia who was pursued unsuccessfully through the courts, named law firms Taylor Wessing, Schillings, Carter Ruck and Mishcon de Reya as having sent the letters.
As someone who lives every day, all day, with the thought that anything I publish might lead to a libel action, I appreciate such comments being drawn to our attention.
The simple fact is that we cannot have a free country without a free press. We have a country without a free press because the rich have access to oppressive libel laws that they use to abuse press freedom.
Amongst the many lessons to learn from war with Russia is that the UK libel law needs to change, and very soon.
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I’ve read Burgis’s book (Kleptopia) and can highly recommend it. You can tell how close he got to the truth by the behaviour of the law firms.
This happens a lot.
The local authority that I work for had a chief executive once who was actually hired as a consultant for tax purposes – not an employee. He had come from the south of the country and had left his previous authority under a cloud and had enough money to set up an injunction against anyone who wished to investigate the misconduct that led to him leaving his previous authority. And the idiot politicians in this town where I work were stupid enough to employ him.
His period of office was dominated by excessive cost cutting and job losses/changes to terms and conditions and bullying. He was to put it bluntly , a complete bastard. All he did was create fear in the LA which led to paralysis across a lot of service sectors as people fought to keep their jobs.
So you are right – if you’ve got the cash you can protect yourself from scrutiny and protect your ‘brand’.
It’s an abuse of law in my view.
Agreed
I noted Carol Cadwalladr, who exposed much of the Cambridge Analytical involvement in the referendum, is being sued by Aaron Banks. I find his attitude of sneering contempt quite revolting. The last reference I saw was in January so I don’t know how the case is proceeding. This would seem to be an example of the need for change
It is waiting for judgement
Ian,
Here is Carol C from twitter yesterday:
“Here’s what most people don’t know. Arron Banks didn’t just sue me for defamation. He sued the Electoral Commission. It’s a taxpayer-funded body, a libel trial costs circa £2m & it settled. Part of that settlement involved deleting info about the NCA referral from the internet”
https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1503844513802072075
So, the wealthy not only intimidating journalists and authors with litigation threats, but also our public ‘watchdogs’. I find that utterly horrific. The twitter thread is worth reading.. She says that had he threatened to sue her employer, The Guardian, instead of her, they would have settled out of court too. Carol continued because she crowdfunded for her costs. I’m proud to say that I’m one of the 30,000 people who contributed.
One of my morning reads is ‘Arseblog’, a very professional aArsenal blog. He has commented a number of times about unsuitable ownership . It seems that lawyers working on behave of Russians evev feel the need to silence a football blog. Below is a relevant paragraph with a link to the full post below that. It is worth a read.
‘One thing that is barely mentioned is how aggressively litigious people like Abramovich are/were. Without going into details, I’ve been on the receiving end of correspondence from his high-powered solicitors. Similarly, when Alisher Usmanov was on the scene at Arsenal, his legal people kept a close eye on any stories that involved/mentioned him, ready to send letters demanding deletions and corrections. They made it extremely difficult, nigh on impossible, for the regular Joe to speak out, and in the absence of larger organisations taking a stand, dissent was shut down. Sounds like a very familiar tactic, eh?’
The full blob piece is here;
https://arseblog.com/2022/03/sanctions/
We are surrounded then by people who addicted to money and the power it bestows upon them.
Another negative output from Thatcherism to crown her existence.
There was a clip on Youtube yesterday on evidence given before the Select Committee by Catherine Belton, she didn’t miss and hit the wall.
https://youtu.be/2Z90XFW5pu4
It is the threat of litigation and the exorbitant costs of defence against those with deep pockets which is abusive, and it is not just libel law which is abused.
Although the focus is on the super-rich abusing their wealth, I question whether we have it the wrong way round, that some in the legal profession offer to abuse the Law for a fat fee and to the Client it’s chicken feed.
The recent Andy Wightman case was a budget version of the same scenario, but when he crowdfunded the defence and got the funding the case effectively collapsed.
I contributed
This is the other thing that will get overlooked:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/russia-rich-wealthy-western-elites-thomas-piketty
This makes an interesting point
https://davidallengreen.com/2022/03/oligarchs-in-london-what-lawyers-are-to-blame-for-and-what-they-are-not/
In particular
(Quote)Individual lawyers at any one time can only work with the law as it stands.
If the law does not permit or enable a thing, then a lawyer cannot make a difference. (Quote)
Which isnt to say that some lawyers either sail very close to the wind OR act abusively on behalf of their clients.
Both legal change, better regulation and better oversight by The Courts are needed
I think David Allen Green got this badly wrong
A lot of lawyers do too
What a load of tentacular material.
If Richard thought this way – did herd thinking about accountancy and the rest – where the hell would we be?
Lame.
What David was clearly and correctly saying there is that legislators (and not lawyers) are responsible for what the law actually is.
Lawyers are their to advise their clients on how the law may help them achieve their ends.
If the law needs to change – to allow or prohibit something – then politicians need to act to change the law. Legislate to make it more difficult to bring or threaten libel proceedings, for example.
David’s post goes on to say “The defence above does not absolve lawyers in England and Wales from personal responsibility.”
Every lawyer has a personal, moral and ethical choice about which clients to take on (the cab rank rule is largely bunk: any barrister can make themselves unavailable if they wish) and how to advance those clients’ interests.
There is, however a problem for lawyers here. Parliament is well represented by lawyers. Lawyers, independently are quite capable of pointing to flaws in the law. Lawyers have influence over drafting law; we may argue about how much, but it is not clear their input is always of great value, especially for reform. The failure of law being criticised in the P&O case has been around for a long time. I know of cases of fire and rehire; of “redundancy” and re-hire offered for the same job; it seems to have become mainstream. The lawyers have not done anything to change this state of affairs; at least so far as I am aware. They have been more engaged in executing the process than reforming it, as far as I can see. I can think of lawyers who have been vocal about the inadequacies of the current inadequacy of the fraud laws, but not ‘redundancy’ fire and re-hire.
I also have real objections to NDAs for the same reason as SLAPPs. Back in the 1990s NDAs became commonly used by companies, understandably to share sensitive commercial information with third parties in commercial negotiations (I have first-hand experience of this); now they are commonly used to protect the powerful from public scrutiny or criticism.
We have allowed the law in Britain to become primarily the creature of the rich and powerful; that is the elephant in the room. This is quite obvious to anyone of independent opinion; it is ‘de facto’ incontrovertible. We should be able to expect more from the profession that represents the law.
Your last para may always have been true, but now more than ever – and deliberately
In many ways (and in her own words) Carole Cadwalladr’s life has been ruined by being punished by Aaron Banks for the sin of doing her job.
This is unconscionable. A triumph of plutocracy over democracy.
We like to talk of democracy, freedom and the rule of law but the truth is British values only tangentially champion those things. What we truly champion is wealth and the privileges of those who have it.
I sincerely hopes she wins her case
It’s all so unbalanced. The tabloids with their deep pockets can publish pretty much any calumny about the likes of you and me, and at best we’ll get a “clarification” in small print at the bottom of page 17. In the meantime when serious wrongdoing by those with deep pockets is called out, it is SLAPPs all round. Money is power.