An interesting case defended by
@PurplePenguin's favourite lawyer, Dan Neidle, about being sued for defamation for £8mn.
Dan Neidle
March 11, 2026 at 12:58 PM GMT
A tax barrister sued me personally for £8m for libel after we linked him to a tax avoidance scheme. Today the High Court struck out the claim, granted summary judgment, and ruled it was a SLAPP. The judgment is highly critical.
The barrister, Setu Kamal, objected to being linked to an absurd tax avoidance scheme sold by a firm called Arka Wealth. They claimed to eliminate all corporate tax, income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax – not just in the UK but across Europe. Laughable.
Kamal declined to comment on our article, either before publication or immediately afterwards. Months later, he threatened defamation proceedings unless we removed the article, although he was never very specific about what, precisely, his complaint was.
He then sent a bizarre legal threat, requiring that I pay him 80% of amounts his clients claimed he'd lost in fees. And demanding I publicly state my "sincere belief" that he is "the leading barrister in the field of taxation in the country".
He then applied for an "on notice" injunction requiring me to take down the article. But Kamal gave me no notice - a serious breach of court rules. (This is what Mrs Justice Collins Rice said in today's judgment)
He then filed a defamation claim, which had several extraordinary features. Mainly, he didn't like being linked to the Arka Wealth scheme. That was super weird when their website said he gave an opinion for it. (This point wasn't litigated in our strike out)
This would have been a joke of a claim, but when someone is suing you for £8m you have to take it seriously. And any lawyer will say that even the most overwhelming legal case always has a 10-20% chance of failing... So I hired an excellent team of lawyers - Matthew Gill and Charlotte Teasdale at the Good Law Project, and Greg Callus and Hannah Gilliland from 5RB. The strategy was to try to get rid of the claim as quickly and inexpensively as possible. We applied to strike it out. In part because the claim just made no sense, in part because it relied on a factual untruth, and in part because the article was clearly opinion. This was a conventional old-fashioned strike out.
We then did something else. the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 created a new way to strike out defamation claims if they were "SLAPPs" - litigation intended to chill free speech. It had never been used. We used it. We won on all of this. Got the conventional strike out. Got the SLAPP strike out. Good news for free speech campaigners. But... This case, laughable in many ways, and struck out in forceful terms by Mrs Justice Collins Rice, still cost me six months and over £100k in fees. I should be able to recover this from Kamal - I don't know if in practice I'll be able to. I could do this. I don't have a day job. I am financially secure. I'm a lawyer who relishes litigation... But - obviously - I'm immensely privileged. A blogger or tweeterer receiving Kamal's threat would be irrational to fight it. Many people couldn't afford the £3k+ an initial lawyer letter would cost.
And that's the problem with libel law. The law itself is pretty reasonable. Our hypothetical blogger would be reasonably confident of winning, if their article was fair But they couldn't afford to. This is the chilling effect of libel law. No other area of litigation has libel law's potential to damage public life. Libel law enabled Jimmy Savile, Robert Maxwell, Cyril Smith, and many other monsters (note that I'm too cowardly to mention the still-living examples). Rules that are rational in commercial litigation become actively dangerous when they can be weaponised to silence critics of wrongdoing. And so it's right that we should treat libel law differently from other litigation.
