THE REPUTATION OF MIKHAIL FRIDMAN AND PYOTR AVEN IS WORTH £18,000 EACH, BUT IT COST SIXTEEN TIMES THAT MUCH TO DEFEND — ENOUGH TO BANKRUPT CHRISTOPHER STEELE
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_withJuly 9, 2020
It was the 412th of Francois de la Rochefoucauld’s maxims that doesn’t stand the test of either time or money. “Whatever degree of disgrace we may have brought upon ourselves,” he said, “it is always within our power to re-establish our reputation.”
High Court judge Sir Mark Warby ruled that claims made about their corrupt closeness to President Vladimir Putin, prepared by Christopher Steele for use by the Democratic National Committee against the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, had been “hearsay, some of it opinion, and much of it based on unverifiable information from unidentified sources”; “data [which] are inaccurate or misleading as a matter of fact”.For years Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, the controllers of Alfa Bank of Moscow and LetterOne Holding in London, have been trying but not succeeding. This week they scored a success, but not quite of the kind they, or La Rochefoucauld, meant.
When fabricating his claims Steele “evidently did not ask for any details of the hearsay information”. Later, when under cross-examination in court, Steele admitted that “a key element of [his] allegation was contradicted by information readily available on the internet.”
Most of Steele’s shoddy fabrications were acceptable in British law. This, Justice Warby ruled, was because they were provided through the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to an unnamed “senior UK government national security official”, and to the FBI for “the purpose of safeguarding national security”; and because the “US and UK are the world’s leading English-speaking democracies, with a wealth of closely integrated interests… co-operation between the US and UK on matters of security is a vital part of our nation’s security arrangements.”
Complaining that Steele had changed his story from his initial witness statement to his second witness statement, and then in the witness box, Warby concluded that he preferred Fridman for truthfulness.
“There is nothing that casts doubt on Mr Fridman’s evidence on this issue.”
That was the allegation the Alfa group had traded favours with President Putin, and that they had bribed him with “large amounts of illicit cash…in the 1990s when he was Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg.” This, the judge ruled, was not only a fabrication but was also unlawful.
In compensation, Warby awarded £18,000 each to Fridman and Aven, for a total of £36,000.
“I accept,” the judge qualified his award, “that the claimants have suffered distress as a result of the disclosures complained of, though the majority of the distress they have been caused will inevitably have flowed from media publications for which Orbis is not responsible in law: the Buzzfeed Article and others. My assessment is that each of the claimants is a robust character, not given to undue self-pity. Mr Tomlinson [barrister for Fridman and Aven] was right to ask for only ‘modest’ damages for distress.”
Modest for Fridman; ruinous for Steele. High Court experts estimate the combination of fees and costs for the barristers and solicitors required for the court claim by the Alfa group would have come to between £500,000 and £600,000; that’s roughly sixteen times the compensation awarded.
The penalty is concomitantly higher for Steele and his Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., the firm he has run since his official espionage employment ended at MI6. According to the compay’s last financial account, there isn’t enough money to pay the legal bills. Steele’s business is bust.
The lawsuit against Steele began two years ago, on May 4, 2018. After six days of hearings in February and March of this year, Warby’s judgement was issued on July 8; read it in full. Two preliminary decisions were issued on February 27 and on March 17.
Left to right: Sir Mark Warby; Mikhail Fridman; Pyotr Aven; Christopher Steele.
The new London case was not a libel lawsuit. The reason is that, although Steele’s allegations had been published in the media, he had made his claims against Fridman, Aven and Alfa in a confidential, unpublished memorandum. His liability for that, the Alfa lawyers argued, was that he had violated the UK Data Protection Act (DPA) of 1998.
What Steele had done when he had gathered information on his Alfa targets and then reported it to his clients, comprised
“personal data relating to the claimants, some of it sensitive personal data, which are inaccurate, contrary to the Fourth Data Protection Principle [accuracy], and which have been processed by Orbis in ways that are unfair, unlawful or otherwise non-compliant with the First Data Protection Principle [fairness].”
The faking of sources and allegations in the memoranda of Steele’s Golden Showers dossier was obvious from the very beginning.
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