Britain’s courts are being used as “tools of intimidation” by Russian oligarchs and their lawyers to silence public interest reporting, two investigative journalists have said.
Catherine Belton, the author of Putin’s People, who faced five legal cases brought by Russian oligarchs and firms, including Roman Abramovich, said the system was “stacked in favour of deep-pocketed litigants from the outset”.
She told the foreign affairs committee that the succession of claims cost Harper Collins, her publisher, £1.5 million to defend and amounted to “harassment and intimidation”.
“It’s the chilling effect of the costs,” she said. “The way the system has been constructed is that the system is so lengthy that it will end up costing your publisher more than £1 million, sometimes £2 million. The process is so elaborate that the costs are enormous.”
Belton was sued by Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven — among Russia’s richest men. All three have been sanctioned by the government over their links to Putin.
Advertisement
She named several law firms which have represented oligarchs, including Harbottle & Lewis, Schillings, Carter-Ruck and CMS.
She said that Schillings had used “very aggressive tactics” in defence of oligarchs and singled out Geraldine Proudler at CMS, who represented both Fridman and Aven. She said that Proudler was “somehow” on the board of the Guardian Foundation, which defends media freedoms, and yet “still saw fit to go after journalists like me for public interest reporting”. Proudler stepped down from the board of the Guardian Foundation this month.
Tom Burgis, a journalist at the Financial Times and author of Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering The World, said that firms including Taylor Wessing, Schillings, Carter-Ruck and Mishcon de Reya applied “psychological pressure” to journalists.
“They [the legal letters] are often written in a tone of righteous indignation where the ‘journalist’ has behaved appallingly and in bad faith. What you are threatened with . . . I spent quite a long time trying to realise why so many journalists recoil and will walk away from a story — you risk humiliation in a public square.”
He disclosed that one of his sources, a former investigator at the Serious Fraud Office, had received a legal letter from Quinn Emanuel after meeting him in the underground car park at the National Theatre in London.
Advertisement
The letter stated: “You attended this meeting with notebooks and folders. One of which appeared to be an orange/red notebook.” He said: “How could they have possibly known this? This meeting had been arranged using an encrypted messaging app.”
Quinn Emanuel declined to comment. CMS said that it strongly rejected allegations of impropriety, particularly those made against Proudler. It said it was confident that its actions were “compliant with all professional regulations” and that it had been reassessing its work with Russian clients since the invasion of Ukraine.
All firms named by Burgis and Belton were approached for comment.
