A journalist and publisher in the United Kingdom are being sued by a Russian billionaire because of a book about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As reported by The Associated Press, “Catherine Belton’s book ‘Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West’ charts the rise to wealth and power of former KGB agent Putin and his circle of associates after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.”
Belton is a former Financial Times correspondent in Moscow and her publisher is HarperCollins. They both “contested a defamation claim in a London court on Wednesday from billionaire Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich,” per the outlet.
Abramovich took issue with specific parts of the book, saying that the book’s argument that he bought the Chelsea team in 2003 because he was told to do so by Putin is “false and defamatory.”
The journalist is also being sued for libel by Russia’s energy firm, Rosneft, which is owned by the state. “HarperCollins was also facing suits from Russian businessman Mikhail Fridman and Russian banker Petr Aven, but Tomlinson said Wednesday that those claims have been settled,” per the outlet.
As reported by Reuters:
Lawyers for Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company, said in documents submitted to court that they took issue with passages in the book which were understood to mean that the company had “expropriated” the assets of YUKOS – once Russia’s biggest oil company – and purchased YUKOS assets at a “farcically rigged auction”.
Rosneft and CEO Igor Sechin did not respond to written requests for comment on the case when contacted by Reuters.
Lawyers for Rosneft took issue with passages in the book which claimed that Sechin was behind what Belton called “the attack” on Yukos.
Abramovich’s lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson, said that the book “holds itself out as a serious work of contemporary history, but unfortunately it repeats lazy inaccuracies.”
Tomlinson told the High Court that “The claimant is described in the book as Putin’s cashier and the custodian of Kremlin slush funds.”
“What is said to be happening is that Mr. Abramovich is making his wealth available to Putin… secretly to Putin and his cronies – that is the view the reasonable and ordinary reader would take,” Tomlinson said of the book.
Andrew Caldecott, a lawyer for Belton and HarperCollins, said people who read the book would come to the conclusion that “there are grounds to suspect Mr. Abramovich was acting at the Kremlin’s direction.” The book also has a “firm denial” from a person near to Abramovich, he said, per The Washington Post.
The hearing is set to go on for two days and is meant to decide “what a reasonable and ordinary reader would understand the allegedly defamatory statements to mean. Those disputed statements will then form the basis of the defamation trial,” Reuters noted.
Critics have pointed to free speech concerns and the ability for people who are wealthy to challenge disapproval in Britain’s courts. What is also alarming, however, is the blatant attack on a journalist from a state-sponsored Russian energy firm and extremely wealthy Russians who are potentially close to Putin.