When the rich own the truth

After a war spent shooting down German bombers, it is in the law that Peter Carter-Ruck makes his stellar career. He qualifies as a solicitor and is assigned to a firm’s defamation department. He enjoys the urgency of this work. For a while, he defends newspapers. But they start to hire their own in-house lawyers. So Carter-Ruck takes on plaintiffs as clients.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he makes himself available to them – to all who have had their good names tarnished. His ammunition is the threatening letter. Not for him the politesse with which other solicitors write their correspondence. Carter-Ruck’s letters say what he wants and when he wants it. The retraction, the apology, damages.

Some of the most valuable reputations in the land are entrusted to his protection. Robert Maxwell’s, Sir James Goldsmith’s, Lucian Freud’s, Laurence Olivier’s. The country’s perennial rulers, the Conservatives, turn to him. Nigel Lawson, Neil Hamilton, Normans Lamont and Tebbit, Edwina Currie, Cecil Parkinson, Michael Heseltine. When that incorrigible rag Private Eye in 1963 prints a cartoon of Randolph Churchill of which the son of the great Winston disapproves, Carter-Ruck extracts three thousand pounds in damages and a full-page apology in the Evening Standard. In the Eye’s pages, he becomes Carter-Fuck (and when he asks for this to be corrected, Farter-Fuck).

But while those Private Eye hacks scratch around in Soho, Peter can live as his clients do. Four homes. A BMW, a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. A succession of yachts, each called Fair Judgment. Randolph Churchill once took a taxi straight from court to Cartier to buy his invaluable solicitor an inscribed cigarette box in gold and silver. He’s no rich mark, though. Won’t have his wealth leeched away by the undeserving. When he deems the caterers have poured too much champagne at his daughter’s wedding, Peter refuses to pay the full bill.

Carter-Ruck can discern a libel where lesser lawyers see none. The author of a book about Peter Sellers retains him because the Sunday Telegraph’s review, with its lurid insinuations about the star of The Pink Panther and his director Blake Edwards, cannot be allowed to stand. Carter-Ruck fires off a letter. “It is untrue that Peter Sellers and/or Blake Edwards talked to our client excitedly of a new penis-enlarging ointment.” 

Such talent earns reward. When the tears are flowing, he says, that’s the moment to bill a client. Half a day in court: the fee is twenty thousand pounds. His costs for the Ugandan politician Princess Elizabeth of Toro’s successful proceedings in the 1970s over a sex smear story amount to a quarter of her forty thousand pounds in damages. When Neil Hamilton extracts twenty grand from the BBC, Carter-Ruck’s costs are twelve times as much. 

The influence of the Carter-Ruck firm swells to match that of a Fleet Street editor. Its mercilessness consumes Peter himself, who departs saddened by the perfidy of the colleagues who pushed him out. “I’ve put a very great store on loyalty and playing the game and I think, perhaps, some of the younger generation hadn’t had the advantages I’d had because I had served in the army, where loyalty came before your life.”

There is nonetheless a partner at Carter-Ruck who Peter sees as something of an heir. “He’s a very good lawyer. He’s intelligent and he’s got some quite remarkable results. It’s rather presumptuous of me to say he’s following in my footsteps, but some people think that.”

When the Russian state oil company run by Vladimir Putin’s closest crony needs a lawyer to fight for the truth, it’s Nigel Tait who’s hired.

What joys have befallen Igor Sechin since St Petersburg. No longer just the veteran of the KGB’s Angolan campaign serving as gatekeeper to Deputy Mayor Putin. Now he is the don of Russian oil. Few dare to challenge him. But a petite woman from the north of England has. Catherine Belton is her name. She needs to be taught a lesson.

Belton used to be a Financial Times correspondent in Moscow. Lives in London now, from where she’s published a book: Putin’s People. There’s plenty about Sechin in it. He’s known as Russia’s Darth Vader, Belton writes, “for his ruthless propensity for plots”. She says he “had overseen and propelled the legal attack on Khodorkovsky since its start”. Khodorkovsky: the richest Russian back in the 1990s when Putin and his crew came to the Kremlin. They’d had to knock his political ambitions out of him. Send him to the gulag and dismember his oil company, Yukos. Some of Yukos’s most valuable operations ended up in the state oil company, Rosneft. The billionaire Igor Sechin is Rosneft’s chief executive.

Sechin’s at the heart of the siloviki, the KGB cabal who control Russia. It was the takedown of Khodorkovsky that demonstrated their control over that most powerful weapon, the law. That’s what this Belton says. “The pressure Sechin had brought to bear on the judges, the speed of the appeal process, the lack of substance to the charges, had brought the court system irrevocably under the siloviki. If, previously, the judges’ pitifully low wages had left them open to bribery by powerful oligarchs, now the Kremlin was taking over.”

To be sure, come 2021 there’s plenty more for Sechin to celebrate. Russia is feared again; traitors like Sergei Skripal can run as far as Salisbury but they’ll still get a dose of nerve agent. No one likes Covid but it is at least helping to spread corruption around the west through crooked contracts to cronies of the ruling classes. And four years after Putin’s regime helped him win the White House, Donald Trump is bringing the United States to the brink of collapse. 

But this damn book is an irritation. The insufferable Alexei Navalny waves a copy in his new video on Putin’s palace. It’s maddeningly effective, the way this lawyer exposes kleptocracy. He’s being taught a lesson or two in the gulag. For Catherine Belton, they’ll need different techniques.

Nigel Tait has risen to head Carter-Ruck’s defamation and media law department. Sometimes they act for broadcasters and publishers defending a case. What they’re known for is shutting down journalism (even though, they say, they do not “set out improperly or unreasonably to censor the media”).

Tait and his colleagues have helped to pioneer the super-injunction: a court order that certain information, including the existence of the order, must remain secret. Unfortunately, there are those who trample on the rights of the rich. Like that MP who unmasked one of Carter-Ruck’s super-injunction clients as the multinational commodities corporation Trafigura. Back in 2009 a Guardian reporter got hold of a confidential Trafigura report about the dumping of toxic waste in Africa. A judge granted a gagging order, stipulating that his ruling must not be revealed in the media because it could be seen as an attempt by the company “improperly to muzzle the press”. 

Paul Farrelly MP tabled a motion in the House of Commons naming Trafigura and revealing the gag order. That meant the Guardian could circumvent the super-injunction using the legal privilege that protects reporting of anything said in Parliament from a defamation claim. Carter-Ruck wrote to the Guardian: print your story and you’ll be in contempt of court. Whereas Peter Carter-Ruck just had to have books pulped and newspapers shredded, these days there’s the whole of the internet to censor. The Trafigura super-injunction crumbled partly because Twitter users defied it.

Since then, comfortingly, lawyers have learned to police online speech. Three years ago, in 2018, Carter-Ruck won a landmark case. A businessman had served six months in jail for conspiracy to intercept communications a decade earlier. He now wished this fact to be excised from the internet. Invoking a new “right to be forgotten”, he demanded Google scrub references to his crime from its search results. Google’s bosses refused. The judge sided with Carter-Ruck, even after Google’s lawyer warned that the businessman was being granted a “right to rewrite history”.

This is what Carter-Ruck do. They win. They make the public record say what their clients want it to say, or, more frequently, not say.

Sometimes the press must be kept in order even when it’s hard to see that much harm’s been done. Take the time in 2001 when the tabloids printed a picture showing a pair of pert young buttocks on display in Ibiza. This shapely rear, they reported, belonged to a gentleman romping on a beach with Mick Jagger’s daughter Jade. None other than the twentysomething nephew of Camilla Parker Bowles who founded that new concierge service, Quintessentially. But the reports were wrong: these buttocks were not Ben Elliot’s. He hired Carter-Ruck, won an apology and damages – then got with Jade Jagger anyway.

And don’t the papers screech when they lose. “The day free speech drowned in a paddling pool of olive-oil,” the Sun once bleated. A judge had granted an injunction on a story about two of Nigel Tait’s celebrity clients: a man who had enjoyed a threesome lubricated with said condiment, and this frolicker’s rich, famous spouse. Rupert Murdoch’s paper went to the Supreme Court and lost. The judge ordered the Sun to pay the celebrities’ legal costs.

Costs. Nigel Tait’s most powerful weapon. Judges don’t tend to award damages above a hundred thousand, so the real terror for the media and their insurers is lawyers’ fees. Defy Tait and lose and you’re on the hook not just for your own but his. He charges five hundred pounds an hour. Every time he reads an article or watches a news report about his client, that’s another hundred. 

The cost of a UK libel trial starts at about half a million pounds.

Well might an editor quickly agree that Tait’s letter makes a really rather compelling case, and cave. The shift of advertising online has gutted the newspapers’ business model. There’s barely enough money to pay what remains of the journalism staff, let alone hiring lawyers to fight a complaint or for the excess on defamation insurance if you end up in court. Meanwhile, the financial resources of those who bend the media to their will have grown almost limitless. Especially a new type of client, one that emerged as the old order of the Cold War gave way to something new, something richer: the oligarchs.

It took Catherine Belton seven years to write Putin’s People. When the book appeared in 2020, the reviews were superb. The Times judged it “the best and most important on modern Russia”. What the reviewers were missing, as Nigel Tait explains in the letter he sends to Belton on May 28, 2021, is the parade of untruths in her pages.

Tait begins with the usual formalities. He represents Rosneft. It is a Russian company. But it has every right to bring legal proceedings in Britain. Some of its stock is listed on the London exchange. On Rosneft’s international board sit the chief executive of BP and his predecessor. Tait explains that he knows which law firm to write to because they’re representing Belton and her publishers at HarperCollins in the other claims already brought against the book. 

This is true. The defence solicitor for Belton and HarperCollins has never seen a legal attack of such scale and intensity, brought by the cream of London’s reputation-management law firms. Roman Abramovich, Russian oligarch and Chelsea FC owner, is suing. Mikhail Fridman is suing, and so is his business partner. All told, defending the book could cost five million pounds. The publisher’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, is rich, but not as rich as Putin’s kleptocracy and the oligarchs who feed off it.

At the foot of the first page of Nigel Tait’s letter are logos of the top-rank awards that Legal 500 and the Chambers guide have bestowed on Carter-Ruck. Over the next eleven, he makes his case. It is outrageous to claim that Rosneft paid an enormous kickback to Putin and his KGB associates. 

Mikhail Khodorkovsky? He’s a crook. The Russian authorities simply took various enforcement actions against him and his oil company for fraud and tax-dodging. These investigations were properly conducted, and he was convicted in accordance with the relevant Russian laws. The Russian judiciary took instructions from the Kremlin? A baseless allegation. And there was no “murky deal” by which Rosneft acquired Khodorkovsky’s oilfields. It was all perfectly proper. 

The aspersions Belton casts on Rosneft’s London flotation are misplaced. The harm that Belton has done to Rosneft’s reputation is serious. Not just that, she has harmed a whole nation. “The false information published in the book has resulted in lower investor trust in the Russian investment climate.”

Nigel Tait and his clients are ready to go to court. If Belton and her publishers wish to avoid this fate, they must urgently recall and destroy every unsold copy of Putin’s People. They must delete the offending passages from the audiobook and the ebook. They must publish a retraction and an apology in all future editions. They must then read in court a statement agreed with representatives, including Nigel Tait, of the Kremlin’s oil arm. They must undertake not to repeat these allegations. They must pay damages to Rosneft – this company that Putin’s closest ally runs. And they must reimburse this tool of the Russian regime for the sums it has spent retaining Carter-Ruck.

Belton is stunned. What she wrote about Rosneft taking over Khodorkovsky’s oilfields – it’s been said countless times before in the press, and in an international court ruling in The Hague. She declines Tait’s invitation to censor herself, so they go to court. 

A judge rules that all but one of the passages in Putin’s People that Tait’s complained about fail to meet the basic threshold of libel proceedings: they don’t defame the claimant. Once Belton has made a minor tweak to her text to insert a denial by the company, what remains of Rosneft ’s case is withdrawn. Yet even when Nigel Tait loses, he wins. On the face of it, this one is an ignominious defeat. But to gauge Carter-Ruck’s success on what happens in court is to misunderstand the service it gives clients. Sure, the Rosneft claim has ceased early. But what will happen the next time a journalist considers writing about the company? Or about Igor Sechin. Or Trafigura. Or all those other clients Carter-Ruck’s known to represent, from the African mining bosses to Tesco and Liam Gallagher. The journalist, their editor or the newspaper’s lawyer will pause. Better, they may well conclude, to do a story about someone else.

This is an edited extract from Cuckooland by Tom Burgis, published by HarperCollins