LONDON — There were plenty of rave reviews for “Putin’s People,” a 2020 best seller about the Russian president’s inner circle, but a small group of spectacularly rich men hated the book and they didn’t hide their feelings. Over the course of a few weeks, all of them filed suit against the author, Catherine Belton, and her publisher, HarperCollins.
The first case was filed by Roman Abramovich, a billionaire confidant of Vladimir V. Putin, who contested a suggestion in the book, articulated by three former associates, that he had bought the Chelsea soccer team on instructions from the Russian leader.
The banking tycoons Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven were next, and on the same day a letter of complaint arrived from Alisher Usmanov, a metals and mining magnate with a reported net worth of $20 billion. Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, soon piled on.
“When we were facing this at the beginning, I didn’t know whether the publisher would be able to withstand the barrage of claims,” Ms. Belton said at a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in Parliament two weeks ago. “This was five big cases from some of the world’s richest men, all at the same time, and I didn’t know whether we would have to withdraw the book.”
The onslaught was facilitated by one of Britain’s legal niches: lawyers who specialize in suing, or threatening to sue, reporters, publishers and broadcasters for defamation.
Britain has long had a reputation for plaintiff-friendly libel laws, and despite reform efforts in the past decade, the country has remained an accommodating home away from home for Russia’s robber barons. Until the war in Ukraine changed the political climate, the public here knew little about the history of the men who earned their fortunes by allying themselves with Mr. Putin, in no small part because reporting on them could prove financially ruinous.
The stars of this corner of the bar include Nigel Tait, the managing partner at Carter-Ruck and head of the firm’s defamation and media law department. He represented Rosneft’s claim against Ms. Belton, and his online bio crows that one of his specialties is getting ahead of looming libel issues with a minimum of fuss.
“He has prevented the publication of many articles about clients,” the bio states, “often by means of a phone call or letter.”
Mr. Tait was among a group of lawyers denounced by name in a speech in Parliament in early March by Bob Seely, a Conservative member of Parliament for the Isle of Wight. Mr. Seely also called out Geraldine Proudler, a senior partner at a firm called CMS, who represented two of the oligarchs who sued over “Putin’s People.”
“How on earth have we allowed this to happen?” Mr. Seely said in Parliament. “A free press should be intimidating kleptocrats and criminals. Why have we got to the position in our society, a free society, where we have kleptocrats and criminals and oligarchs intimidating a free media?”
A libel lawyer on speed dial is just one of the many comforts and conveniences that British professionals offer oligarchs from around the world. A few trillion pounds have sloshed through London, with an assist from real estate agents eager to sell prime property and lawyers and bankers ready to launder cash in offshore havens, writes Oliver Bullough, author of “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals.”
They are complemented, tag-team style, by advisers who help clients donate to universities and museums and make introductions to politicians as well as members of the royal family.
“The idea is to build a reputation by being a philanthropist, or whatever, and once you have built that reputation you can defend it in a British court,” Mr. Bullough said. “A few donations here and there, and you’re kind of safe.”
Oligarchs can donate their way to legal impunity because Britain’s libel laws place the burden of proof on defendants, who must prove that an allegedly libelous statement is true. In the United States, the First Amendment puts the burden of proof on the plaintiff, who must prove that a writer acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
For years, an aggrieved claimant didn’t even need to live in Britain to file a suit here. This is what made London a premier destination for “libel tourists,” litigants in search of a friendly jurisdiction. The cottage industry this created was advertised by none other than Boris Johnson, who, in a 2012 speech to the Confederation of British Industry while the mayor of London, said: “If one oligarch feels defamed by another oligarch, it is London’s lawyers who apply the necessary balm to the ego.”
The government attempted to rebalance the scales with the passage of the Defamation Act of 2013. It required plaintiffs to show a connection to the country in order to file in it, and stipulated that plaintiffs demonstrate they suffered “serious harm.”
If this was supposed to embolden the media, it did not work, said Andrew Scott, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, who conferred with the Ministry of Justice as it drafted the law. The standards needed to win a defamation case were raised, he noted, but nothing was done to address the cost of the process. With journalists and publishers still facing the prospect of hugely expensive legal fees incurred battling angry oligarchs, there was little change.
“Me and a colleague at the time wrote that the only ones who are going to benefit from this new law are lawyers and tyrants,” Mr. Scott added.
This is why veteran reporters have finely honed intuitions about how to avoid trouble.
“In the last couple weeks I’ve had a dozen editors ask me to write about Roman Abramovich, and I’ve had to reply that I have never looked at him because it’s never occurred to me that I’d get anything published about him,” Mr. Bullough said. “You become quite good at navigating the rules. It’s a very effective form of censorship.”
So far, there has been no legal blowback from “Butler to the World,” which was published on March 10. The statute of limitations for libel cases is one year, and it isn’t unusual for oligarchs to sue as that deadline approaches. The cases against “Putin’s People,” for instance, landed as its first anniversary approached.
The book was never pulled from stores, but battling the cases cost HarperCollins nearly $2 million in legal fees. Ultimately, some suits were tossed out, others settled, and in December, HarperCollins reached an agreement in which changes were made to the text, including additional denials from representatives of Mr. Abramovich. HarperCollins called the agreement fair, in part because no damages were paid to Mr. Abramovich.
The publisher and Ms. Belton did issue an apology, stating that certain aspects of the book were insufficiently clear. As part of the agreement, the publisher also made a charitable contribution for an error relating to Mr. Abramovich’s ownership of the oil giant Sibneft.
During the hearing in Parliament, Ms. Belton, who is a former Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, said some of the changes bothered her, small as they were. But continuing to fight in court would have cost another $3.3 million, she said, and Mr. Abramovich turned up the pressure by filing a similar case in Australia, which would have taken another $3.3 million to defend.
“No matter how good the sourcing is on some of these claims, and no matter how great the public interest, the cases are just too expensive to defend,” she said. “The system is stacked in favor of deep-pocketed litigants from the outset.”
The Russia-Ukraine War and the Global Economy
Rising concerns. Russia’s invasion on Ukraine has had a ripple effect across the globe, adding to the stock market’s woes and spooking investors. The conflict has already caused dizzying spikes in energy prices, and could severely affect various countries and industries.
The cost of energy. Oil prices already were the highest since 2014, and they have continued to rise since the invasion. Russia is the third-largest producer of oil, so more price increases are inevitable.
Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders worry that Moscow could cut flows in response to the region’s support of Ukraine.
Food prices. Russia is the world’s largest supplier of wheat; together, it and Ukraine account for nearly a quarter of total global exports. Countries like Egypt, which relies heavily on Russian wheat imports, are already looking for alternative suppliers.
Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.
Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctions intended to restrict Russia’s access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.
Historians trace the libel law bias in favor of the rich and powerful to the British aristocracy, which wanted to keep unflattering news out of the press. Now the legal and banking industries have pivoted to assist rich foreigners.
“We were the oligarchs,” Mr. Bullough said, summarizing the history of the British Empire. “Now, we don’t steal money from other countries any more. We just help the people who did the stealing.”
Mr. Putin’s lethal incursion into Ukraine appears to have upended life here for rich, Kremlin-connected Russians. And Mr. Johnson is done wooing oligarchs on behalf of libel lawyers. In March, the prime minister was peppered with questions in Parliament about the way Britain’s legal sector has aided Putin allies for decades. He replied that the legal profession and “everybody involved in assisting those who wish to hide money in London, assisting corrupt oligarchs,” was “on notice.”
Britain has placed more than 1,000 Russians and Russian entities under sanctions since the start of hostilities, including the men who sued Ms. Belton.
And this month, the government set out a list of proposed reforms intended to end the “bullying” of reporters. The rich have been using “the threat of endless legal action and associated costs to pressure their opponents under defamation and privacy laws,” the Ministry of Justice stated. Among the ideas under consideration is a cap on the legal costs that plaintiffs can demand, or a new standard that requires plaintiffs show “actual malice” when bringing a case.
Some law firms have already rethought their work in this field. None returned calls for comment, but CMS recently announced that it was closing its Moscow office, while rejecting any notion that Ms. Proudler had acted improperly. The firm also said it had been “reassessing its work for Russian clients” and decided “we will no longer be accepting new instructions from Russian-based entities or from any individuals with connections to the Russian government.”
Carter-Ruck posted a statement on its website that said claims against the firm — a reference, presumably, to Mr. Seely’s withering assessment — “are misconceived and are rejected entirely.” It added that “we are not acting for, and will not be acting for, any individual, company or entity associated with the Putin regime in any matter or context, whether sanctions-related or otherwise.”
One sign that the force field around oligarchs is getting porous are the stories now appearing in the British media, some of which would have been hard to imagine before the Russian invasion.
Most notably, a popular BBC long-form news show, “Panorama,” just aired a documentary about the source of Roman Abramovich’s wealth. Richard Bilton, a reporter of the show, and Jonathan Coffey, a producer, would not discuss its journey from conception to broadcast, but it was apparently a lengthy one. Mr. Bilton said work on the 30-minute production started four years ago.
Opposition leaders maintain that reforms proposed by the government are “too little, too late.” Susan Hawley, executive director of the nonprofit Spotlight on Corruption, agrees. She said Britain had become so legally and culturally enmeshed with oligarchs that the country was moving sluggishly compared with other European countries.
“The European Union is freezing superyachts,” she said. “We’re so far behind that there’s a risk that by the time we get our act together, there won’t be anything left to freeze.”
