The mistake of the oligarch

CAZUS Deripaska: Why should the claims for slander must be filed in England, and not in the USA

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Minister of Government Wales Karl Sargent, about whom everyone around spoke only good, committed suicide after he was removed from work because of accusations of improper behavior-allegedly he once put his hand on his knee to a face of the opposite sex. In England, when you are slanderously accused of something like that, it usually takes a year and a half in order to restore your good name. The time is to restore the career much more, sometimes even the rest of life is not enough for this. Sargenta is sorry. But after the American shores - and here is now raging the scandal for the scandal, a list of stars accused of sexual harassment, Steven Sigal has just replenished, - the echo of the story of Sargenta came up, I asked myself: why didn’t he file a lawsuit about slander? After all, he would be considered by the British court (England, Wales, Scotland - no matter where) is not American. Sargent had a colossal chance to go out the winner in the fight against slanderers.

I asked myself the same question after the recent decision of the Court of Columbia in Washington, who rejected the lawsuit of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska against the American news agency Associated Press (AP) without the right to resume. The head of Rusala complained that AP slandered him - on March 22, 2017, it printed an article that stated that the American political strategist Paul Manafort, long ago, was led by Donald Trump, who had now surrendered to justice, secretly worked for Deripaska in order to improve the image of Vladimir Putin.

Deripaska’s failure in the American court once again confirmed the same old truth: to defend their honor and dignity, famous people should not in the USA, but in the city named Se. So lawyers and experienced judges called London. Sue is in English and the female name of Na, and the verb “sue”.

Masters of euphemisms

It was much easier to judge for slander in England and Wales for a very long time than in America and the mass of other countries. No wonder, when Boris Berezovsky was offended by Paul Khlebnikov “Kremlin’s Cross”, published in the American journal “Forbes” in December 1996, he initiated a lawsuit to protect honor and dignity in New York, where I then brought Khlebnikov in the journal, but in London.

In England, at that time, only 1915 cops of Forbes were distributed, while in America - 785 thousand. The article was printed in the American publication and dedicated to Russian affairs, but Berezovsky nevertheless chose to seek protection not in the Russian court and not in American.

Forbes defenders protested, but the judicial lords, proud of the fact that the English courts all over the world, allowed Berezovsky and his partner, Aeroflotovsa Nikolai Glushkov, to sue London.

In 2000, the British newspaper, The Guardian recalled that Lord Poppluell, one of the two judges, “dissidents” ( the rest of the judges considered it differently. -NT) who voted for “Forbes”, proved: the article in the journal “was not attached to England. This is an American magazine, the article is written in the American style and concerns exclusively Russian affairs. ” According to The Guardian, “printing this article, editor and publisher of Forbes could not imagine that they would be judged for slander in the courts of the country, which has no attitude to the journal, or to the subject of the article, or to the activities that she describes.”

Therefore, the magazine was carefully quoted by one American businessman who spoke the following about his Russian colleagues: “These guys are criminals of outrageous scale. It’s like if Lucky Luchano ** was the chairman of the Board of Directors of Chrysler.

The British could not just write that someone was drunk in the trash. They wrote Tird and Emotional, "Tired and emotional." But everyone understood that this someone was on the eyebrows. Instead of “lover” or “lover” they wrote Constant Companion, “constant companion”

Khlebnikov could safely write that "behind them lies a string of corpses, debts that cannot be obtained, and intimidated competitors trembling in their lives."

In America, Khlebnikov was not threatened with either the summers or killers. Damn him to go to Moscow.

In England, “Forbes” lost, although this victory did not bring money to Berezovsky, but brought only the statements of the magazine that the plaintiff did not kill Lastyev and was not “the boss of the mafia” in general.

Ironically, the need to bypass judicial slingshots became one of the reasons why the English seal was better than the American one. In the late 1970s, I read in the luxurious English magazine Spectator, which took in the library of the BBC Corcontal in New York, samples of euphemisms used by British colleagues in order to disarm the subjects.

The British could not just write that someone was drunk in the trash. They wrote Tird and Emotional - "Tired and Emotional." But everyone understood that the name was on the eyebrows. Instead of “lover” or “lover” they wrote Constant Companion, “constant companion”.

In that distant era, to call someone “same-sex” meant to offend him, so they wrote Confirmed Bachelor-the “inveterate bachelor”. (Now, when homosexuals do not hide their same -plate, but on the contrary, proud of it, this lotion is no longer needed and only in my memory is preserved).

In England, the whole world was judged for slander. Sir Robert Maxwell judged there the American magazine New Republic, which had 98 thousand subscribers in the United States, and 135 in the United Kingdom.

Commander Martin Pacard dried £ 450 thousand at the Greek newspaper Elefterotype, which sold only 40 copies in England. In 1997, the Israeli, who lived in London since 1985, received permission to judge two Israeli newspapers there for slander, who went to Hebrew and sold 141 and 19 copies, respectively, respectively.

Los Angeles Oil oligarch Armand Hammmer, a friend of Lenin and subsequent Soviet leaders, judged the publisher of his biography in England, which he did not like-although the biography was written in America and entered the kingdom of only 3 thousand copies. Hammer died in 1990 at the age of 92 - by that time the legal expenses of the parties were £ 1.5 million.

I have accumulated dozens of such examples, and not only mine.

In the end, the so -called “slanderous tourism” (Libel Tourism) was so dangled that four years ago they cropped it somewhat. But suing them is still easier than in the USA.

The boundaries of slander

Deripaska’s appeal to the American court, and not to British, was his first mistake.

The second mistake is how the lawsuit was drawn up.

As Ellen Segal Hugwell, appointed to this position, noted in his final decision by Bill Clinton, the media portray Deripaska "one of the main close associates of Putin." He himself once told reporters that he did not separate himself from the interests of the state. Subtext: "So what is the wrong article in the article?"

The judge also noted that Deripaska went abroad with the Russian diplomatic can, that is, obviously, represented the interests of Russia. Therefore, if the Ar wrote that he paid Manafort for lobbying for Russia's interests in the United States, then there is nothing slanderous in this statement.

“The court takes into account,” wrote Hugell, “that Deripaska does not refute any significant facts” in the article of the AR, “relating to his biography and his role in promoting the interests of Russia in the international arena.”

In the United States, a “public person”, which, of course, is Deripaska, it is not enough to prove that the defendant slandered him; He must also prove that the offender did this not by chance, but with an angry intent. And such in the actions, AR Judge Hugell did not see.

In the United States, a public person may win a slander lawsuit and if he proves that the offender acted "with gross neglect of the truth." The judge concluded that the plaintiff also did not prove this.

The AR, according to the judge, did not directly accuse Manafort (and even more Deripaska) of violating the "Law on Registration of Foreign Agents", which orders to register in such a capacity in the Ministry of Justice if you work in the USA for a foreign government. Instead, the agency’s article gave the following phrase of the Republican Senator Lindsay Graham: “I don’t know if he violated the“ Law on Registration of Foreign Agents ”, but, I think, we need to figure it out in more detail.”

The statement in this form is not a direct slanderous statement, the judge writes. But even if the Ar was directly claimed that Manafort was engaged in criminal activity, then this could not be interpreted as that Deripaska was engaged in illegal lobbying in the United States.

Even if the article falsely states that Deripaska and Manafort have concluded a contract for promoting the interests of Russia, this statement is not a slanderous nature, writes Hugell. The judge notices that the plaintiff put phrases from the article of A, trying to create an impression that reading it as a whole does not leave.

Finally, Deripaska claims that the article accuses him “of participating in a complicity of the Kremlin’s anti -democratic program”, the judge writes and notes that there are no such statements in the article. According to her, “just to associate someone with the interests of the Russian government” is not slander.

Manafort, foreign agents, the image of Putin and the Kremlin, the promotion of Russian interests, attempts to influence the elections in the United States-in the last year and a half, these words became almost memes due to rapidly worsening Russian-American relations. Now, perhaps, Deripaska, the owner of one of the largest states in Putin Russia, also realized this.

* Vladimir Kozlovsky, New York journalist, permanent author NT.

** Charles Luchana, nicknamed the lucky man, he is a Salvatore of Lukaniya - an Italian criminal who became one of the leaders of organized crime in the United States, and then deported to his homeland.