UK law firm that acted for Putin’s warlord Prigozhin 'broke no rules'

Exclusive: Taking cash from a sanctioned Russian mercenary chief to enable him to sue a British journalist is not an abuse of our legal system, solicitors' regulator finds

‘He seemed like such a nice chap’ - Yevgeny Prigozhin addressing Wagner Group units withdrawing from Bakhmut, Ukraine, in May 2023. Source: Telegram.

London is known as the “libel capital of the world” - and with good reason. If you’re rich, powerful and have stories you want buried, this town is the place to do it.

I’ve faced so-called Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (Slapp) lawsuits numerous times. The DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson sued me. The case never made it to court. Nor did the libel claims taken by Tory donors (plural), associates of the longtime dictator of Kazakhstan, countless scammers and many more.

But the craziest defamation case I’ve ever worked on had nothing to do with me.

Two years ago, openDemocracy - where I was then editor-in-chief - broke the story of how the British government had helped the infamous Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin sue Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website Bellingcat, in London 2021.

Prigozhin had already been subject to UK sanctions for more than a year, for providing support to the murderous mercenary Wagner Group in Libya. Despite this, our reporter Jim Fitzpatrick uncovered documents showing how the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), a branch of the Treasury then under Rishi Sunak’s control, had issued special licences to British law firm Discreet Law to work for the Russian oligarch.

The Wagner Group supremo - who later died in a fireball after crossing Vladimir Putin - was at this point already so notorious that he couldn’t open a bank account in the UK, own property here, or even enter the country. And yet the UK’s sanctions regime still allowed people like him to cover their ‘basic needs’ - including applying for a licence to pay for legal fees.

And so, when Prigozhin took umbrage with something Higgins said about him, the Treasury’s OFSI gave his British lawyers special permission to take the Wagner boss’s money, fly business class to St Petersburg to meet their client, and prepare his defamation case against the acclaimed journalist.

The story caused a scandal. It was a first class investigation from Jim Fitzpatrick - and it seemed the most open and shut example of a Slapp lawsuit imaginable. A Russian oligarch sanctioned by the British government had sued a journalist over a handful of social media posts that had dared to say something entirely true - that Prizoghzin was leader of the notorious mercenary Wagner Group, something he himself later admitted.

Rather than pursue Bellingcat in the Netherlands, where it was based, the case was taken against Higgins personally, in claimant-friendly London.

Our revelations were hugely embarrassing for the Tory government - and the then-opposition was quick to capitalise. Labour’s Pat McFadden, now a front-bench minister, swiftly wrote in the Guardian that the government must “resolve to make sure this never happens again”.

In October, prime minister Keir Starmer promised that his government “will tackle the use of Slapps to protect investigative journalism.”

So what’s Labour done about the problem of Slapps since then? Not much.

In November, during a debate in the Commons, a justice minister announced that the government would not be introducing anti-Slapps legislation in this parliamentary session. Instead “non-legislative measures” would solve the problem.

The minister singled out the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) - which oversees the legal profession - as praiseworthy for having “already taken action” on Slapps.

But today, Democracy for Sale can reveal just how hollow this assurance is - and how much more needs to be done.

The SRA spent two years ‘investigating’ how Prigozhin tried to use British law to silence a journalist. Astonishingly, in a four page assessment now seen by this newsletter, the regulator finally ruled that Discreet Law “acted appropriately” in representing the sanctioned Wagner leader - and that the case was not a Slapp.

“We have decided to take no further action”

It is worth unpacking some of what happened, because it shows how inadequate the government’s supposed “non-legislative measures” for tackling Slapps really are.

Priogzhin retained Discreet Law to sue Higgins after Bellingcat published a multi-part investigation into the man known as ‘Putin’s chef in August 2020. Bellingcat had revealed how Prigozhin was closely tied to Russia’s intelligence arm, the GRU. Higgins shared the coverage - which clearly had huge public interest - in a series of Twitter posts.

In court papers filed by Discreet Law in December 2021, Prigozhin claimed that Higgins’s tweets had caused him “great distress” and his character and reputation had been “gravely damaged”.

The proceedings against Higgins were eventually struck out in May 2022, after Prigozhin failed to comply with court orders. (Discreet Law had pulled out of the case in March, a month into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The law firm has since closed.)

Higgins filed a complaint with the SRA, accusing Discreet Law of serving an “unmeritorious Slapp suit…despite their client being subject to multiple international sanctions.” The case cost Higgins £70,000 in legal fees. (Money that will never be repaid.)

At the time there were already significant concerns about oligarchs using London libel courts to silence journalists, as in the cases of Catherine Belton, author of ‘Putin’s People’, and Tom Burgis, who was sued by a Kazakh mining giant.

The SRA took almost two months just to acknowledge Higgins’s complaint. Throughout this time Prigozhin was mostly in Ukraine, posting gun-toting YouTube videos from the frontlines with the Wagner soldiers he was so greatly distressed by being associated with.

In September 2022, five months after the complaint, Higgins’s lawyers, McCue Jury & Partners, wrote to the SRA “politely asking” for an update. Tumbleweed.

Stories about Prigozhin continued to appear. The New York Times reported that Prigozhin had admitted founding Wagner. The Intercept published a bombshell investigation that showed how Discreet Law had strategised with Prigozhin months before the libel claim was issued, first floating the idea of pursuing Higgins in the Netherlands - home to Bellingcat - before alighting on claimant-friendly London instead.

“As discussed on the call, we will review the social media posts in the UK in order to, first, try to establish stronger evidence of jurisdiction for the English courts,” a Discreet Law attorney wrote in an email in July 2021, months before the claim was filed.

McCue Jury & Partners sent PDFs of all these stories to the SRA. Still no response.

At the same time, the SRA was publicly at the vanguard of anti-Slapps efforts. In November 2022, the regulator published a “warning notice” to solicitors, encouraging them “to form views about the intention or motive behind their client’s cases and to reject or not accept cases which they might conclude are Slapps.”

The SRA was far less active though, when it came to Higgins’s complaint. By March 2023, ten months after the initial filing, still nothing. A mid-May deadline came and went. The SRA eventually responded… on 28 March 2024, almost two years after the initial complaint.

“Having now completed our investigation into the conduct of Discreet Law, and the solicitor’s handling of Mr Prigozhin’s matter, we have decided to take no further action,” the SRA report states.

The solicitors’ regulator found “no evidence” that Discreet Law was aware that Prigozhin ran the Wagner Group and said the law firm “went above” the required due diligence checks. (Prigozhin passed UK money laundering checks after his Russian lawyers provided Discreet Law with a copy of his passport and a utility bill that was actually in his mother’s name.)

McCue Jury & Partners, unsurprisingly, asked the SRA to reconsider. In August, the SRA made its final response. Discreet Law had “acted appropriately” and “there was no basis to investigate further.”

The SRA said that “whilst there was public speculation surrounding Mr Prigozhin’s connection with the Wagner Group, there was no evidence to suggest the Firm should have been aware that his instructions in this respect were false”.

The SRA added that “Mr Prigozhin did not acknowledge his position in the Wagner Group until September 2022, which was after the Firm ceased acting in March 2022.”

An SRA spokesperson told this newsletter that the regulator takes “allegations that solicitors have engaged in Slapps or abused the litigation process very seriously.”

“We looked at all the available information and decided to close the matter with no further action. If further information is made available, we can look again at the issues. Our investigation took some time due to the complexity of this matter and the need to make sure we thoroughly investigated all the issues raised,” the SRA said.

A spokesperson on behalf of Discreet Law said: “Following a thorough investigation, the SRA concluded that Discreet Law had behaved appropriately in relation to this matter, and that the complaints were unfounded. Discreet Law cooperated fully with the investigation and points out that the SRA’s findings were based on information which Discreet Law were unable to share with anyone other than the SRA because lawyers owe a duty of confidentiality to former clients.”

Open Lawfare

A sanctioned Russian warlord suing a British journalist for stating the blindingly obvious is, apparently, not an abuse of the British legal system.

Indeed the SRA did concede that Prigozhin’s claim was “concerning” and that “it now appears it was used for abusive purposes”.

So if the Prigozhin case was not a Slapp, what is, in the regulator’s eyes?

This isn’t just an academic question. In defending its choice not to act on Slapps itself, the Labour government placed great weight on the regulator’s supposedly stellar powers, hailing in the Commons its “new fining powers of up to £25,000”. (For context: fighting a High Court defamation claim can cost north of £3 million.)

The government also cited approvingly that “the SRA had received a total of 71 reports on Slapps”. But receiving reports is pretty meaningless if there is no action actually taken.

The SRA did recently find that a lawyer acting for Nadhim Zahawi had breached its Code of Conduct for Solicitors by implicitly threatening a defamation claim against tax expert Dan Neidle - but the regulator did not find the Zahawi case was itself a Slapp.

“The Prigozhin case seems to any reasonable person like a blatant example of a Slapp case,” Eliot Higgins told Democracy for Sale, “but the SRA seems ill-equipped to respond to the circumstances around the case, and it really begs the question of what value they have in terms of addressing the issues with Slapps.”

Higgins added that anti-Slapps legislation is needed “as quickly as possible, especially in a period where incredibly wealthy citizens from outside the UK are focusing their attention on our internal politics."

Labour MP Lloyd Hatton told us that “the SRA's inaction when faced with such an egregious case shows the woeful inadequacy of our current framework. A sanctioned warlord using legal threats to intimidate a British journalist was already beyond the pale. And it was wholly unacceptable that the Government allowed Prigozhin to use frozen funds to pay for this abuse of process.”

Hatton added that “without a real deterrent to lawfare, deep-pocketed individuals, oligarchs, crooks and kleptocrats from around the world will continue to use our courts to suppress accountability. This foul play will continue to flourish. And Britain will remain a go-to destination for lawfare."

Hatton is right. Our legal system remains open to another Prigozhin - so when will our politicians and regulators act to stop it?

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