Ken Bates wins £150,000 libel award
Judgment has been handed down in the libel claim brought by Ken Bates against Tom Rubython and Business F1 Magazine in respect of an article, written by Mr Rubython and published in the May 2023 edition of the magazine. As Mr Rubython stated in evidence, he wrote the article because he had been “enraged” by the nature of a feature on Mr Bates published in a national newspaper some weeks earlier.
The article occupied 4 pages and was found by the Judge to have been a “comprehensive character assassination” of Mr Bates. There was no attempt to contact Mr Bates before publication and his letters of complaint following publication were treated with mockery and contempt, including the publication on the magazine’s letter page of a misleadingly edited version of one such letter.
The Judge found that the article bore meanings which included
- that Mr Bates had amassed his great wealth through a career built on dishonesty, including acquiring the company behind Chelsea FC for a nominal sum by making promises to the owner that he had no intention of keeping (and did not keep) and stripping the company’s assets for his own benefit and then putting it into liquidation to clear its debts and illegally and fraudulently transferring its remaining assets to a new company he had set up;
- using the proceeds of that fraud to acquire an interest in the company behind Leeds Utd and then putting that club into receivership to clear its debts while transferring ownership of the club to entities which he covertly controlled so as to be able to sell the club for a massive profit;
- evading paying UK taxes so that he would be at risk of arrest were he to return to the UK;
- that Mr Bates had almost certainly had business rivals murdered when he was running a concrete business;
- that there are very strong grounds to suspect that Mr Bates murdered Matthew Harding and 4 others by arranging for their helicopter to be sabotaged so that it crashed, and that he did so to prevent Mr Harding exposing him as a crook.
The Defendants made no attempt to defend any of the allegations complained of, whether by way of a defence of truth, honest opinion or public interest reporting, but disputed that Mr Bates’ reputation had been seriously damaged by what had been alleged.
The Judge found that each of the imputations complained of had caused serious harm to Mr Bates’ reputation. He awarded him £150,000 in damages, ordered that a summary of the judgment be published by the Defendants and decided that it was right to grant an injunction to restrain them repeating the same or similar allegations.
William McCormick KC, instructed by Antonia Foster & Caitlin Harris of Carter-Ruck, represented Mr Bates.