Stressful, infuriating – and intensely boring: my two years defending a libel claim

At 10am on December 1 last year, I took my seat at a long boardroom table surrounded by frosted-glass walls, in the towering offices of a London law firm. I felt like Attenborough in the natural habitat of the City lawyer. The meeting had been called to finalise a legal defence on which hundreds of thousands of pounds rested. I did not want to be there.

I felt faintly sick: not only was I due to publish a big story that day, I was there to undergo three hours of (largely friendly) interrogation regarding our defence of a lawsuit launched by a multibillion-dollar Kazakh investment vehicle. Our opponents had taken umbrage with my reporting from two years earlier – and spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to make me see the error of my ways.

My role, from the moment proceedings were issued, was to reconstruct what I knew when I published the story. What I knew about the minutiae of Kazakhstan's banking system, charity law and financial regulation; UK company disclosure rules; share transfers to Nevada-based non-profits; the impact of sovereign immunity clause on property rights; the fair value of shares sold to a UAE investment vehicle in 2020; and political rifts among Kazakhstan's ruling elite. Would you remember whether or not you had read a certain article two years ago? Could you prove it?

The story started with an investigation published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, detailing the affairs of charitable foundations set up by Nursultan Nazarbayev, a murderous dictator who ruled Kazakhstan for 30 years. The story was stellar, and one of the biggest corporate entities that had been connected to the foundations, Jusan Technologies, was based in London. Jusan Technologies held a huge wealth of Kazakh assets. It had formed a central part of a complex group structure, which included the foundations, before it was sold to a US non-profit in 2021. We felt there was more to add.

Its accounts had been signed off by auditors already under separate investigation by the UK regulator. Its former directors had played important ministerial roles in the Nazarbayev government. And a portion of its shares had been sold to a little-known entity, which my co-reporter Simon Lock had just tracked to the corporate empire of a controversial Emirati sheikh.

Over the following few weeks, we interviewed foreign policy experts, forensic accountants, credit analysts, academics and lawyers. We reconstructed a corporate network stretching across the UK, US, Kazakhstan and Luxembourg. We pored over Kazakh banking regulations, stock exchange documents and government statements in English, Russian and Kazakh. We fact-checked the story meticulously, footnoting it with evidence for every claim, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential.

Before publishing, we put all of our allegations to the company, its current and former directors, and the charitable fund declared as its ultimate controlling party. It prompted some fierce responses from Boies Schiller Flexner, a major US law firm perhaps best known for its founder’s work defending Harvey Weinstein. But we believed in our story – in both its truth and in the public interest of publishing it – and we ran the article on the morning of February 17 2022.

Three months later, the letter arrived. We were being sued.

Bellicose threats before publication are common, but letters formally initiating litigation are far rarer. In six years working on investigations, this was the first time I’d received a full-blooded lawsuit.

It claimed that our article had defamed the company, Jusan, by accusing it of acting as a corrupt vehicle through which Nazarbayev exercised control over his sprawling international business empire. We contested that interpretation.

Immediately there began a seemingly endless string of meetings where I would field questions from our lawyers on every detail of the article while senior editors weighed up our next move. To their credit, and my relief, retracting the story was never on the cards. Instead, discussions centred on how to win the legal battle.

Journalists tend to be cagey about the legal threats they face. If the lawyers curb or kill their reporting, you don’t usually hear about it. And if the publication mounts a legal defence over a story, it tends not to mention the litigation publicly for fear of ratcheting up the stakes and incurring more costs. A libel case in the London courts can easily cost upwards of £500,000 to defend – and well over a million if it reaches trial. For some newsrooms, the stakes are existential.

But TBIJ went on the attack. The team briefed journalists on the threat we faced. We ran a crowdfunder, in collaboration with openDemocracy, to fundraise for the fight ahead. We spoke to parliamentarians who raised our case in the House of Commons. We took the case to independent free speech organisations who declared they thought the lawsuit was a SLAPP – intimidatory litigation aiming to stifle free speech. And we reported on the case against us, using court documents to put new information on the public record, including details of the Labour peer who had taken up a directorship of the company suing us.

Last week, after more than two years, countless hours of legal discussions, and interminable correspondence with the other side, the case was settled. The terms of the settlement are confidential. But the article remains live. And we are, shall we say, extremely pleased with the outcome.

The overriding feeling, after endless back-and-forth with lawyers who charge about as much in a day as I earn in a month, isn’t even relief – it’s anger. In my view, the case was a farce from the outset. To this day, Jusan hasn't shown our story to be wrong. (And in the one instance we made an error, we were happy to amend it.) Our reporting was clearly in the public interest. And the hundreds of hours – and hundreds of thousands of pounds – that the litigation had swallowed were time and resources that couldn’t be spent on other stories.

The great secret of being sued is that it is intensely, relentlessly boring. A single clause might be dissected over the course of weeks, only for everyone to realise that, actually, you were right in the first place. A throwaway phrase can be seized upon by a claimant and spun into some kind of slanderous conspiracy that bears little relationship to reality, or what you wrote. In English law, the burden of proof largely rests on the publisher, meaning that preparing a defence – whether on the grounds of truth or public interest – is painstaking. Claimants know that. Attrition is part of the game.

In the grand scheme of threats faced by journalists around the world – arrest, detention, imprisonment, mob execution, state-sanctioned murder – a libel lawsuit sits at the milder end of the spectrum. I expect no violins for defending my work. That said, London is one of the last places you want to be sued, and many journalists face financial ruin if they lose. Thankfully, that wasn’t my situation: TBIJ made clear from the get-go that all liability was theirs, and the support of senior editors throughout was unwavering.

But when the cost of defending a suit could bankrupt most small newsrooms, and the time it takes to fend off lawyers looking for their next billable hours stops you reporting other stories, it’s hard not to think that something has gone gravely wrong – both with the law and the legal system as it presently operates. Our story survived the onslaught; many others don’t. When members of the public think that they aren’t always being told the whole story, they’re often right – stories are killed every day simply because they’d be too expensive to defend. But it isn’t the illuminati or the New World Order keeping sensitive information from the public, it’s lawyers in slick suits defending the interests of the eye-wateringly wealthy.

A couple of hours into the December boardroom meeting with our lawyers, we asked for a brief pause so we could publish my latest story. The KC leading our case asked what it was about. “Five thousand words about [law firm] Carter-Ruck and the libel industry,” I said. An eyebrow arched over the rim of his glasses. Apparently we had not learned our lesson. Nor do we intend to.