Do Russian oligarchs have a secret weapon in London’s libel lawyers?

There were plenty of rave reviews for “Putin’s People,” a 2020 bestseller 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.

Congratulations to @CatherineBelton – her extraordinary work PUTIN’S PEOPLE is #5 in the Sunday Times bestsellers l this week. pic.twitter.com/D6qeVzQ0OG
— William Collins Books (@WmCollinsBooks) March 9, 2022
The first case was filed Roman Abramovich, a billionaire confidant of President Vladimir Putin who contested a suggestion in the book, articulated three former associates, that he had bought the Chelsea football team on instructions from the Russian leader.
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,” 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 one of Britain’s legal niches: lawyers who specialise 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 hory of the men who earned their fortunes allying themselves with Putin, in no small part because reporting on them could prove financially ruinous.

The stars of this corner of the bar include Nigel Tait, managing partner at Carter-Ruck and head of the firm’s defamation and media law department. He represented Rosneft’s claim against Belton, and his online bio crows that one of his specialities 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 means of a phone call or letter.”
Tait was among a group of lawyers denounced name in a speech in Parliament in early March Bob Seely, a Conservative member of Parliament for the Isle of Wight. 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.”

Well. This is spicy. Conservative MP Bob Seely makes the most of parliamentary privilege to name individual London lawyers working for Russian oligarchs and questions their morality. pic.twitter.com/Cq6XoNvBLR
— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) March 1, 2022
“How on earth have we allowed this to happen?” 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 ass 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, 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 being a philanthrop or whatever, and once you have built that reputation you can defend it in a British court,” Bullough said. “A few donations here and there, and you’re kind of safe.”
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. (Twitter)
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 libellous 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 tours,” litigants in search of a friendly jurisdiction. The cottage industry this created was advertised none other than the man who became Britain’s prime miner, Boris Johnson: In a 2012 speech to the Confederation of British Industry while the mayor of London, he said, “If one oligarch feels defamed another oligarch, it is London’s lawyers who apply the necessary balm to the ego.”
The government tried 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 Minry 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 journals 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,” 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,” 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 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 anniversary approached.

We’re at @frontlineclub tonight lening to the brilliant @OliverBullough talk all things BUTLER TO THE WORLD, and Britain’s role in aiding kleptocrats and criminals. Essential reading! pic.twitter.com/hqzSLK6b3M
— Curtis Brown Books (@CBGBooks) March 14, 2022
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 Abramovich. HarperCollins called the agreement fair, in part because no damages were paid to Abramovich.
The publisher and 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 Abramovich’s ownership of oil giant Sibneft.
During the hearing in Parliament, 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 Abramovich turned up the pressure 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 favour of deep-pocketed litigants from the outset.”
Horians trace the libel law bias in favour of the rich and powerful to the British arocracy, which wanted to keep unflattering news out of the press. Now the legal and banking industries have pivoted to ass rich foreigners.
“We were the oligarchs,” Bullough said, summarising the hory of the British Empire. “Now, we don’t steal money from other countries anymore. We just help the people who did the stealing.”
Putin’s lethal incursion into Ukraine appears to have upended life here for rich, Kremlin-connected Russians. And Johnson is done wooing oligarchs on behalf of libel lawyers. In March, the prime miner was peppered with questions in Parliament about the way Britain’s legal sector has aided Putin’s allies for decades. He replied that the legal profession and “everybody involved in assing those who wish to hide money in London, assing 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 Belton.
This month, the government set out a l 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 Minry 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 to 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 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 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 program, “Panorama,” just aired a documentary about the source of Abramovich’s wealth. Richard Bilton, a reporter for the program, and Jonathan Coffey, a producer, would not discuss its journey from conception to broadcast, but it was apparently a lengthy one. Bilton said work on the 30-minute production started four years ago.
Opposition leaders maintain that reforms proposed 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 the time we get our act together, there won’t be anything left to freeze.”