Before I call the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), I should inform the House that Mr Speaker has authorised a waiver under the terms of the sub judice resolution to allow reference in this debate to certain cases which would otherwise be subject to that resolution. This is because the issues to be debated relate to matters of national importance. The right hon. Gentleman is aware of the cases covered by the waiver.
That this House has considered the matter of lawfare and the UK court system.
I am grateful to Mr Speaker for his having issued a waiver for this debate. I of course recognise why it is important that Members of this House do not seek to influence the outcome of cases that are before the courts, and if these matters were before a jury, I would be wary of raising them, but they are matters of national importance and I am grateful for the opportunity to raise them.
We are rightly proud of our legal system in this country. Britain is home to some of the fairest and best courts in the world. Centuries of jurisprudence mean that London is among the most respected cities from a legal perspective. However, what is attractive to legitimate businessmen is also attractive to those with nefarious intentions: there are those with exceptionally deep pockets and exceptionally questionable ethics. These people use our justice system to threaten, intimidate and put the fear of God into British journalists, citizens, officials and media organisations. What results is injustice, intimidation, suppression of free speech, the crushing of a free press, bullying and bankruptcy. It results in protection from investigation and gives encouragement to fraudsters, crooks and money launderers. It has turned London into the global capital of dirty money. In extreme cases, it can undermine the security of the state by allowing people to act as extensions of foreign powers.
This is lawfare—lawfare against British freedom of speech, lawfare against the freedom of the press, and lawfare against justice for our citizens. Lawfare is the misuse of legal systems and principles by extraordinarily rich individuals and organisations to destroy their critics and opponents. In many cases, our reporters face reputational and financial ruin in defending themselves from these malevolent cases; even if they win, the expense and impact are huge. The chilling effect on a free press is extraordinary. Some newspapers hesitate to cover certain topics, such as the influence of Russian oligarchs, for fear of costly litigation. In at least one case I know, the publication avoids the subject outright.
My right hon. Friend is making a fantastically important speech, and I look forward to joining him to talk about these many important subjects. What does he think about those London-based law firms that are so willing to sell intimidatory legal threats as part of their services?
My hon. Friend alights upon a very important point. It is very clear that some London-based law firms have found an incredibly profitable niche that they are willing to pursue without too much concern about the outcome. I think the professional bodies for those law firms should be looking very hard at them, as should the Government. It is an important point, which I am sure others will develop.
The right hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. On the point of the lawyers who are facilitating all this—the army of lawyers doing the dirty work of the Russian Government and of oligarchs and the Governments of other hostile regimes—does he agree that were we to introduce a foreign agents registration Act in this country, lawyers acting on behalf of those people should be included in such a registration process?
The hon. Gentleman makes an important and persuasive point, but I suspect there are other people in this room at the moment—I am looking to my left here—who have stronger authority on this me. What I am trying to argue today is that this issue requires Government action that will involve a whole series of things from reorganising how civil cases are dealt with, through how we license private investigation to the sort of reporting arrangements for foreign agents that the hon. Gentleman is talking about. This is a whole area that the Government will have to take on in toto.
The assault faced by Burgis, HarperCollins, the Financial Times, the Serious Fraud Office and others has been described by a coalition of organisations as
“a form of legal harassment used by those with deep pockets to silence journalists”.
That same coalition is
“deeply troubled by the chilling effect this wave of legal action has on legitimate investigative and anti-corruption work by journalists, law enforcement officials, and others”.
This is not just about the financial costs; these actions take an emotional toll on those who are targeted.
Sometimes it does not stop there. Lawfare is often buttressed by other methods of harassment and intimidation. John Gibson, a former Serious Fraud Office case controller, was sued by ENRC for allegedly leaking information to Tom Burgis, the journalist. Why did ENRC suspect that? In cross-examination, ENRC’s lawyer described in detail a meeting between Burgis and Gibson—a meeting that both had gone to extreme lengths to keep secret. It was organised over an encrypted messaging service and held in an underground car park with no telephone signal. So the only explanation for how ENRC’s lawyer had details of this clandestine meeting would be if Burgis, Gibson or both were being actively watched.
As a former colleague of Charlotte Leslie, I think she has been treated appallingly just for doing her job efficiently and in good faith. I am glad that my right hon. Friend has exposed the appalling tactics that have been used against her.
Is there no way to stop repeated legal actions, or the threats of legal actions, being brought? It is the attrition effect of clearly vexatious complaints that intimidates people into submission or silence or, effectively, bankruptcy. Surely there should be some measure that says, “You have one shot at it, at best, and then there is no further recourse to the courts or such legal action.” Would that be a way to stop the appalling actions that my right hon. Friend has been describing?
My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. The way that it happens is that there are legal firms that now specialise in making that sort of intimidating tactic work, and it is based on multiple different laws—as I said earlier, on everything from defamation to data protection and privacy. Therefore, we have to find a way to govern how the courts work to ensure that exactly what he says does not happen and that there are not multiple attempts. After all, someone can be charged only once for a crime, so why can someone be sued multiple times for another sort of misbehaviour?
It is not only Amersi who is engaged in bullying and egregious behaviour, and it is not just law. For instance, Mr Carl Hunter was in contact by phone with Ms Leslie to attempt to informally broker peace between her and Mr Amersi and to urge her to apologise. He told her:
“You need to consider your position—being able to walk the dog at night, being able to sleep well at night.”
He said that she was looking at a “world of pain” on it. Those are clear and unacceptable threats, of which recordings are available, made in an attempt to intimidate. Those recordings contain other rather sinister comments as well.
To reinforce a point that other hon. Members will probably make, although the lawyers—the Carter-Rucks and the Mishcon de Reyas—will say, “Everything that we do is legal,” this is part of a really corrupt and intimidatory practice that veers well into the criminal. Even if the lawyers are obeying the law, other parts of these sorts of campaigns are, frankly, purely criminal.
I take my hon. Friend’s point. He will understand that I am picking my way carefully through my speech, given Mr Speaker’s ruling, so as not to trip into pre-empting the case. I am trying to present facts to the House so it can make its own judgment.
Charlotte Leslie has tried to settle the issue. After that intimidatory approach, she agreed to apologise to Mr Amersi and he rejected it. He is used to getting his way. He justified the use of money to get access to members of the royal family as “access capitalism”—that is his phrase. He has taken the same approach in this case. He throws money at a problem in an attempt to make it go away.
While Ms Leslie has been subject to legal harassment for a year, Sir Nicholas Soames has avoided the brunt of Amersi’s attack. Why? This is not a comment against Sir Nicholas, who is a very good man, but in Amersi’s own words—his rather odd English—it is because of his “grandioseness”. Charlotte, on the other hand, is not seen as grand and is therefore fair game. There is a simple non-legal word for that, which is bullying. That is what we are seeing.
So what do we need to do about SLAPPs? Members of this House will have many more ideas than me, and many of them are much more skilled and knowledgeable than me in these areas, but the clear fact is that there needs to be balance. Dealing with SLAPPs is an issue of balance. It is not wrong to sue journalists—sometimes they make serious mistakes or behave maliciously—but billionaires and multimillionaires should not be able to use the law to shut down legitimate criticism. Even if someone defends their case successfully, in this day and age they face material costs so huge that they will further deter others from following a story, and they can even destroy lives. Just to go off on a tangent, Charlotte Leslie, if she has to meet the costs of all of this, will probably have to sell her home and lose all her savings, and that is what an ordinary person faces in this context.
It is a real privilege and an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) to help open this debate and to follow on from his arguments.
“Follow the money” is the oldest and wisest advice given to journalists who are pursuing the corrupt, shining lights where they need to be shone and hunting the truth, yet this dictum, which has served us so well since Watergate, is now being smothered, suffocated and strangled in courts by allies, associates and friends of President Putin, who is pursuing a hybrid war against the west and against us. That is the context for the debate that we are holding this afternoon.
Many of us in this House have been warning for some years that it is time for this country to wake up to this new threat. Hybrid war is a novel kind of conflict. Once upon a time, wars were fought on land, in the air and at sea, but no more. Hybrid war is a battle for minds as much as it is for land—for influence and narrative, not simply territory. That means it extends the battlefront to space, to cyber-space and, now, to law space. It is fought with tweets as well as tanks, and now it is being fought with writs as one more weapon in the armoury. Of course, the reason for this is simple: what totalitarians, autocrats and kleptocrats fear most is the truth, so what they are seeking to do is to murder the truth, and we are letting them do it in English courts.
My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and I congratulate him on securing this debate. On the point of cyber and hacking, is he aware of cases in which these Russian-backed interests are hacking people’s private data, leaking it and then suing them for libel, and does he agree that that is an utterly absurd and unacceptable position to be in?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I will come on that in a moment.
The truth is that the truth is under attack by oligarchs with Russian connections because they are seeking to disguise the origin of their fortunes, their methods of business and, of course, their networks of friends. The result is that the frontline of this hybrid war now stetches from the streets of Donbass and Crimea and the troll farms of St Petersburg to the law courts of Britain—our courts, in England, here in London.
It was the Intelligence and Security Committee—whose distinguished Chair, theright hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), is present—that made clear on, I believe, page 22 of its landmark report on Russia that the interests of Russian business are now so closely entwined with the interests of the Russian state that it is impossible to unravel them. It is these honourable folk who are now using English courts as their preferred location for the business of truth silencing. According to a survey of 63 journalistsin 41 countries, more cases were brought against journalists in the UK than in America and Europe combined.As theright hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden said, the United States and Europe are now moving to shut this down, but we are not. That is why we are now becoming the global capital of the lawfare industry.
There are now so many cases that today we can reveal—it was evident in the right hon. Gentleman’s speech—what might be described as the oligarch’s playbook. Step one is to target the individual, not the organisation, because the individual is most vulnerable, and take aim at the slightest error. Arron Banks did not go for The Guardian or The Observer; he went for Carole Cadwalladr, and took aim at a single sentence in her TED talk. As we have heard, ENRC went after Tom Burgis personally after he flagged up the information that witnesses to its crimes were being murdered. Paul Radu, who happens to be Romanian, is being pursued in English courts by corrupt Azerbaijani politicians. We have to ask: why are powerful interests from far away suing journalists who are not English and do not write for English titles? Why are they being sued in English courts? Surely that must tell us that something in our country is going badly wrong.
This is yet another great speech. Does the right hon. Gentleman think that these solicitors’ bodies and barristers’ bodies should be more concerned about the very questionable ethics and behaviour of individual lawyers and individual law firms? They seem to be able to get away with whatever they want and offer whatever service, however questionable.
The hon. Gentleman is right on that. When we welcomed the integrated review and the rhetoric of “global Britain”, what none of us intended was that “global Britain” meant London becoming the capital of the global lawfare industry, yet we know about the profits that are being made by some of these firms, which, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden eloquently said, are now carving out a big fat niche for themselves.
In conclusion, once upon a time Mr Churchill warned about an “iron curtain” descending across our continent, from Stettin in the north to Trieste in the south. The challenge for our generation is very different. A kleptosphere is taking shape, stretching from Kaliningrad in the west to Kamchatka in the east. Every day, urgently, incessantly, patiently, friends of Mr Putin are trying to push the frontiers of that kleptosphere into Ukraine, the Balkans, Cyprus, Malta and the Baltics, and, yes, into Britain. It is pushed forward by attacking the weakest brick in our defences, and we in this House must ensure that our courts never become vectors for our country’s opposition. For nearly 1,000 years, our courts have been sanctuaries of justice, but now they are becoming arenas of silence, places in which the truth is killed. It was Václav Havel who said that the greatest defence against totalitarians is to live “in truth”. That is also the greatest defence against kleptocrats. I want to live in truth, which is why I say to the Minister: it is now time for the Government to act.
Before I call Sir Robert Neill, let me just remind everybody that the sub judice waiver is not a general waiver; it relates to specific cases. If people wish to seek guidance, the Clerks at the Table will be able to guide them properly so that they do not stray, which I know Sir Robert Neill will not do.
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These sorts of cases, designed to silence criticism, are so prolific that they now have an acronym: SLAPPs, which stands for strategic litigation against public participation. Such lawsuits are based on laws on defamation, privacy, data protection and—ironically—harassment. In the UK the cost of defending a case, no matter how well sourced and how great the public interest, can run into millions of pounds. These cases are so time-consuming and costly because a disclosure process before trial can be dragged out by deep-pocketed claimants for years to financially hobble the defendant, even before they get to the ruling.
The issue is not just the financial and reputational damage inflicted by these cases; lives are also being destroyed. Defendants are unable to work. Every waking moment is spent looking over their shoulders, wondering who or what is just around the corner. This is not about legitimate recourse against journalists making mistakes—because, as we know in this House, they can and they do; it is about shutting down scrutiny through fear.
Early in 2021, Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny published a video investigation into President Putin’s palace on the Black sea. In the video, he waved a copy of “Putin’s People” by Catherine Belton, a much respected Financial Times journalist at the time. Just two months later, Belton and her publisher were suddenly served with a series of lawsuits, filed over the course of six weeks by four Russian billionaires and the state-run company Rosneft—that, I think, gives away that the Russian state is involved.
Media lawyers with decades of experience in such cases said that they had never seen a legal onslaught of such scale and intensity. Those cases dragged on for over a year, and the cost of that year alone ran into the millions—£1.5 million for Catherine Belton alone. If the case had gone on, it would have cost millions more.
One of those suing Belton—the final one—was Roman Abramovich, the multi-billionaire owner of Chelsea football club. Abramovich claimed that Belton’s book alleged that he had a corrupt relationship with the Russian President and was making payments into Kremlin slush funds. An identical suit was also filed in an Australian court by Abramovich, to effectively double the cost of defending the case and to further intimidate HarperCollins.
It is worth reminding people of Mr Abramovich’s background and the character of the man. We are speaking here of the man who manages President Putin’s private economic affairs, according to the Spanish national intelligence committee. This is a man who was refused a Swiss residency permit, due to suspected involvement in money laundering and contacts with criminal organisations. Abramovich was also deemed a danger to public security and a reputational risk to Switzerland.
Abramovich initially came to the UK on an investor visa. In 2015, the Home Office tightened the rules around those visas, so that applicants could be required to prove the origins of their wealth. In 2018, when his visa was up for renewal, Abramovich withdrew the application. When he bought Chelsea FC, Abramovich was the governor of the Chukotka region of Russia. It was alleged by associates of his that the purchase was done at the behest of the Kremlin. As a result of the purchase, he now has enormous soft power and influence in the UK. I ask the House to come to its own conclusion about whether this man is acting at the behest of the Kremlin or Putin’s Government.
Belton’s case is now settled. Interestingly, there was a huge spin to suggest that Abramovich had won hands down, and he had not, but that is another matter. But for her colleague on the Financial Times, Tom Burgis, the author of “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World”, his legal battles are just beginning. Burgis is being sued by the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, a privately owned Kazakh multinational mining company. Since April 2013, ENRC has been under investigation by our Serious Fraud Office for fraud, bribery and corruption. The investigation is one of the longest-running and most complicated cases that the SFO has on its books. This case, and its reporting, has prompted a wave of legal proceedings by ENRC in the United States and the UK against journalists, lawyers and Serious Fraud Office investigators.
In May 2015, two former employees of ENRC turned up dead on the same day in a Missouri hotel. They were due to be witnesses in the SFO case. The cause of their death was recorded as malaria, but the chances of two people dying from malaria on the same day and at the same time, broadly—within hours of each other—is vanishingly small. The next year, a geologist associated with the company was found dead in the back of a burned-out Audi in Johannesburg. Burgis outlined these facts in his book, but he is now facing the wrath of ENRC, which alleges that passages in the book are “untrue” and “highly damaging”—the reason? Because ENRC interpreted the reporting of the deaths as Burgis suggesting
“murder to protect its business interests, or alternatively, there are strong grounds to ‘suspect’”
that ENRC had them murdered.
Even given the waiver, I should not comment on the substance of the ongoing legal proceedings, but what I will say is that the FBI takes these allegations seriously enough that it is now investigating the Missouri deaths. Take from that what you will, Mr Deputy Speaker.
Amazingly, when the FT reported the FBI’s action, ENRC then took action against that paper. Are we now to understand that journalists are not allowed to publicly report the deaths of witnesses for fear that someone may deduce that they were murdered by a company like ENRC?
This is a private company putting a journalist under aggressive surveillance. It is a private company putting a Serious Fraud Office employee under aggressive surveillance. It is a private company, in essence attempting to undermine the freedom of the press and frustrate the legitimate workings of the state. It is immoral, it is intimidating and it is unethical. Frankly, the entire industry needs to be looked at, and powers need to be put in place to tame the wild west of private intelligence work.
It is not just journalists who are targets for this kind of bullying, and it does not just involve international billionaires. Our former colleague Charlotte Leslie, the director of the Conservative Middle East Council, is facing legal challenges from the multi-millionaire Mohamed Amersi. The court documents outline how Mr Amersi tried to pressurise his way to becoming the chair of the Conservative Middle East Council. It has been suggested that that was because he saw it as a route to a knighthood or other honour, and that Ms Leslie rejects his attempts. In response, he tried to form his own group, the Conservative Friends of the Middle East and North Africa. Ms Leslie then compiled a due diligence note on his background, and it was sent to Conservative headquarters by Sir Nicholas Soames. That memo outlined details about Amersi’s past, his associates and his dealings with Russia. As far as I can see, it was compiled from open source research.
Mr Amersi got hold of this memo. In response, he had his lawyers send demanding letters to both Soames and Leslie. He claimed that the memorandum was defamatory and inaccurate. However, despite the issue rumbling on for over a year, he filed his defamation case only last month. In the meantime, he used data law to take Ms Leslie to court. This is a growing tactic for those using SLAPPs to silence their critics. In November, Ms Leslie appeared in the Royal Courts of Justice. The contention was that she had not responded properly to a data subject access request from Amersi. Usually, the Information Commissioner deals with such disagreements, but when a rich man wants to silence and destroy someone, they go to the courts. The claim was dismissed and Charlotte and CMEC were awarded 65% of the costs, but Amersi is bringing the claim back and a four-day trial has been scheduled for the spring, further ramping up enormous costs.
So, who is Mohamed Amersi? On his website, he describes himself as
“driven by a desire to create a world that’s better for everybody”.
Let’s test that against public domain facts, shall we? In 2005, he made £4 million helping a Luxembourg company to buy a Russian telecoms business. The following year, a Swiss judge concluded that that company was secretly owned by a top crony of Vladimir Putin, Leonid Reiman. In 2006, Amersi was accused in a separate lawsuit of trying to extort a $2 billion payment, not on behalf of himself but on behalf of a Russian oligarch.
Four years later, in 2010, Amersi advised on a transaction in Uzbekistan that was found to be a $220 million bribe to the daughter of the country’s brutal dictator. When he was embroiled in a dispute in the early 1990s, a UK High Court judge described his conduct as “lamentable” and his evidence as “unreliable”, “unconvincing” and “unsatisfactory”.
All that information is available in public court records. I cannot make an authoritative judgment on the matter, so I will leave it to the House to decide for itself whether that served to create a world “better for everybody”. In the latest instance, Amersi has used his wealth and influence to try to bully Charlotte Leslie into silence.
In the United States, 31 states have passed anti-SLAPP laws offering varying degrees of protection—remember that the US already has the first amendment—and in some cases allowing journalists and media organisations to file motions to dismiss such suits at an early stage on the grounds that the case involves protected speech on a matter of public interest. Such a protection does not exist in the UK, enabling the process to be dragged out at great expense to both parties. That is fine for those with deep pockets, but for an ordinary person it is immensely damaging financially and emotionally. It destroys the entire concept of equality under the law.
Other countries are already addressing this issue, and as they do, the problem for London will only grow as more and more ultra-wealthy individuals come here to exercise lawfare. If London is to remain the envy of the legal world, then we need to get a grip on the problem and stop this rampant abuse of our system. If we do not, we will continue to face these kinds of attacks on the freedom of our press—the foundation of our state—and we will leave our people subject to grotesque injustice in the face of this outrageous lawfare.
Step two is to maximise intimidation, using covert surveillance if necessary. As we have heard, investigators and journalists are now being inundated with data subject access requests so that people who are up to no good can smoke out what they are up to. ENRC agents surveilled Tom Burgis, who was in a meeting that had been arranged on an encrypting messaging app; how on earth did it know about that? The Financial Times journalist Dan McCrum, who helped to break the Wirecard story, was subject to online abuse, hacking, electronic eavesdropping and physical surveillance. These people know no boundaries. They are completely out of control.
At one stage, I have been told, Elizabeth Denham, who was the Information Commissioner at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was warned by counter-terrorism officers that MI5 had evidence that she was under active intrusive surveillance ordered by Mr Arron Banks, so her office had to be swept. Others have told us about the “hack and leak” technique whereby systems are hacked into, and information is then leaked to serve as a trigger for defamation proceedings.
Step three is then to file the most ludicrously exaggerated claims. Mr Abramovich’s attack on Catherine Belton took completely out of context what Ms Belton had actually written. We know that Tom Burgis has been attacked because he is alleged to have said that a corporate entity had ordered the murders. There are extraordinary exaggerations and twisting of what has actually been written.
Step four is to co-ordinate the claims with others to maximise intimidation and, indeed, legal costs. Catherine Belton was subject to an onslaught first from the Alpha group, then from Abramovich, then from Mikhail Fridman, then from Shalva Chigirinsky, then from Pyotr Aven, and then from Rosneft—and we are being invited to believe that somehow this was unco-ordinated. They must think we are complete idiots.
Step five, as we have heard, is to file claims in multiple jurisdictions—an example is Mr Abramovich’s suit against HarperCollins in Australia—to maximise the cost for journalists, writers and their publishers. The impact is the creation of legal bills that are so big that they chill and kill the truth. Catherine Belton’s case cost well over £1.5 million, and it would have cost millions more if it had gone any further. Carole Cadwalladr’s case is costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. Major Karpov’s case against Bill Browder left Mr Browder with a bill of £600,000, which the plaintiff has not paid because when he lost his case, lo and behold, he subsequently disappeared.
Democracy’s watchdogs are having their tongues cut out and our writers are having their writing fingers broken. The result is that suspicion multiplies and the risk of corruption grows. I am so glad that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden has put before the House details of Mr Mohamed Amersi, which is a case in point. On Monday I shared intelligence with the House from sources inside the Kremlin and the Russian Government, including information about one of Mr Amersi’s business partners, a man called Leonard Bogdan, who sources tell me has “a definite FSB background.” I now learn that Mr Bogdan’s daughter works for the Conservative party’s central office and—surprise, surprise—was briefly secretary of Conservative Friends of the Middle East and North Africa.
We then learned, as the right hon. Gentleman said, that Mr Amersi’s associate, friend, colleague and lunching partner, Carl Hunter, threatened a former Member of Parliament, Charlotte Leslie, that without an apology to Mr Amersi the case had “all possibility of going further to a really gruesome stage.” What on earth is going on in this country when people like this are able to issue threats to anyone, never mind former Members of this House? And still Mr Amersi thinks he can go to a four-day trial and take Ms Leslie to court.
We still do not know the origin of Mr Banks’s donations to Leave.EU. When the Electoral Commission warned about the poor National Crime Agency investigation, Mr Banks sued the Electoral Commission and forced it to take down a statement about his lies. We have heard from regulators who fear judicial review because a subject access request might come in from representatives of organised crime groups that are seeking banking licences. This is complete madness. Perhaps there are perfectly innocent explanations for all this, and maybe I have too suspicious a mind, but I would like to know the truth. I want newspapers and investigators to be able to hunt down the truth and, where necessary, publish it.
That is why we need action and we need it now. We are still governed by the great European Magna Carta that we wrote in the 1950s, the European convention on human rights. It establishes a positive obligation to safeguard the freedom of a pluralist media and to create a favourable environment for participation in public debate. We are failing to uphold that duty.
It is not simply libel law being abused, as Bill Browder was attacked using cross-border insolvency legislation. We have heard how GDPR is now being misused by oligarchs. I was the shadow Minister on the Public Bill Committee on the Data Protection Act 2018, and I can expressly tell the House that it was not the intention of the previous Parliament for the Act to be used in this malicious way.
The new anti-corruption strategy and the economic crime plan that the Government have to refresh need to include five quick provisions. First, we need what are known as SLAPP-back laws so that a judge can rapidly dismiss a case if it is designated as strategic legal action against public participants. Secondly, we need a public figure defence, as America has, so a person who sues a public figure has a much higher bar to clear and needs to be able to prove actual malice. Thirdly, we need a sanctions regime against vexatious litigants, which could include paying 100% of costs or even punitive costs, to deter the misuse of our courts that we are now seeing. Fourthly, we need a defamation defence fund on the lines proposed by President Biden, and I humbly suggest that it should be funded by a windfall tax on the law firms making millions from the misuse of our courts.
Time and again, we have heard in our research about the behaviour of Hugh Tomlinson, Geraldine Proudler, Carter-Ruck, Mishcon de Reya, Schillings, CMS and Olswang, and it is now time for the regulatory body to pass new rules to ensure these firms follow a good model of litigation principles that ensures rules of good conduct and even liability for clients who refuse to pay their bills when they lose their case, like Major Karpov.