Yevgeny Prigozhin and the corruption of the UK

Why criminal oligarchs love the services London offers

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In 2021, British lawyers representing Yevgeny Prigozhin issued a writ for libel against an investigative journalist. Even at that early date, a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, astonished questions flooded in.

Libel is meant to be a protection of a man or woman’s good name. How on earth could the leader of the Wagner crime gang, a mercenary force that had committed atrocities across Eurasia and Africa, claim that he possessed a good name worth protecting?

In any case, why did Prigozhin want to sue in the UK?  He had no connection to the UK. The UK courts had no apparent business in threatening journalists who exposed Wagner’s crimes. What was it about the legal system of this seemingly respectable country that attracted international criminals?

More to the point how could this seemingly respectable country allow him to sue|? He was already under Western sanctions.  The UK, the US and the EU treated Prigozhin as a criminal. Why was the English legal system nevertheless willing to give him the chance to punish his critics?

The answers take us to the heart of Russian attempts to corrupt the UK in the 2010s.

Prigozhin’s target was the devastatingly effective open-source intelligence site Bellingcat. In August 2020, working with the Insider and Der Spiegel, it explained how Prigozhin’s disinformation, political interference and military operations were a part of a wider subversion operation conducted by Russia’s Defence Ministry and its intelligence arm, the GRU. Bellingcat was showing how the pieces of the mafia state fitted together.

Instead of threatening to sue Bellingcat as a corporate entity, Prigozhin personally sued Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, for  Tweets he had sent with links to the Spiegel and Insider articles.

Prigozhin’s English lawyers claimed that it was outrageous to suggest that their saintly client was in any way responsible for the unlawful activities of the Wagner Group. As for the suggestion that Mr Prigozhin used the Wagner Group to “unlawfully surveil, threaten, and harass independent journalists in order to frustrate and discredit the investigation of his paramilitary operations and involvement in the murder of three Russian journalists,” well, really, the very idea was scandalous.

Prigozhin went for Eliot Higgins personally because he wanted all the advantages the English law gives the super-rich. By suing Higgins, a British citizen, rather than Bellingcat, which is registered in the Netherlands, he stacked the odds in his favour.

An illusion of fairness still distorts impressions about my country. You might think it should not matter that an international criminal can sue for libel in London.  What advantage could he have? The UK is a fair and just country. In the end good chaps, and impartial judges and civil servants will ensure that justice is done.

The fairness illusion prevents urgent reform. It hides the shameful truth that the English law has multiple attractions for international criminals.

First among them is that it is fantastically expensive, and its exorbitant fees give the super-rich an enormous advantage. I once quoted a study which said the costs of fighting a libel action in the UK were 150-times the European average. Legal commentators said the study was flawed (you can read their critique here ) But they did not dispute the size of staggering costs.

You might wonder what Prigozhin had to gain by threatening to sue when every charge Bellingcat made was true. Well, he could tie up a small team of investigative journalists for years as they sought to raise the funds to contest the case. He could threaten them with crippling costs. Maybe Bellingcat would run out of money before the case came to trial and be forced to issue an utterly insincere apology. Maybe Wagner could intimidate witnesses who might give evidence on Bellingcat’s behalf and win. In any event, the mere threat of legal action in a fantastically expensive legal jurisdiction would make other news organisations think twice before running pieces critical of Wagner.

As Higgins’ legal team put it,

“This case was a demonstrable example of ‘Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation” (SLAPP). Instead of seeking a legitimate remedy, Prigozhin brought the case against Higgins in his personal capacity, rather than Bellingcat, with the clear intent to cause him maximum personal distress; thereby stifling genuine public debate.”

It was astonishing, they continued, that the English legal system, was allowing Bellingcat to be hit with the costs of fighting a case, when “both Prigozhin and Wagner Group have been repeatedly subject to financial sanctions by multiple governments (including that of the UK). Prigozhin was made subject to financial sanctions in the UK and EU for his association with Wagner Group’s activities in breach of the arms embargo in Libya. Wagner Group has been accused of gross human rights violations in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and Mali.”

Every word they said was true. But the truth could not prevent the action going ahead.

English lawyers in the 2010s were as eager as bankers, investment managers and estate agents to act for oligarchs.

Legal intimidation reached its apogee in 2021 when four Russian oligarchs and the Russian state oil company Rosneft sued Catherine Belton for writing Putin’s People, a meticulous account of the secret life of the regime. Belton won through in the end. But only because her publisher HarperCollins was prepared to risk losing millions.

“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,”  Belton said afterwards, “the system is stacked in favour of deep pocketed litigants from the outset. My cases are now pretty well known, but they are just the tip of an iceberg; there are journalists who have been censoring themselves, particularly about the activities of Russian oligarchs, for a very long time.”

And that censorship was enforced with the active encouragement of the British state.

Go back to one of my original questions: how could Prigozhin sue for libel when the UK’s sanctions regime had already designated him as a criminal?

The answer, the investigative site Open Democracy discovered,  was that the British Treasury issued special licences in 2021 to let the war criminal override sanctions and launch an aggressive legal campaign in the London courts.

The UK’s own sanctions prevented Prigozhin from coming to London in person. But the Treasury gave permission for his British lawyers to fly business class to St Petersburg so they could meet face-to-face and finalise their legal attack on Higgins.

The kindest explanation for the Government’s behaviour is that it was naïve.  (Other explanations are available, of course.)