We’re helping Dan Neidle face down a seven-figure SLAPP

The tax lawyer and investigative journalist Dan Neidle has been writing about tax avoidance schemes and the people who promote them for years. Unsurprisingly, the people he exposes are rich, used to getting their own way, and unhappy with Neidle’s reporting. One of those people, the tax barrister Setu Kamal, is now suing him for more than £8 million – one of the largest libel claims in English history.

But Dan Neidle’s not backing down.

When Kamal sent Neidle a series of letters earlier this year threatening legal action, we stood by him, offering him the services of our defamation lawyer. We wrote back to Kamal inviting him to follow through on his threats. Now, having failed in an attempt to obtain an interim injunction against Neidle, he’s suing for more than £8 million in damages.

We think that Kamal’s arguments are bound to fail. But we don’t intend to let it get that far. We’re applying to have the claim struck out as a SLAPP – a strategic lawsuit against public participation – the first application of its kind made under the provisions of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, intended to tackle SLAPPs.

SLAPPs are attempts to use the legal system to shut down free speech and honest reporting with inflated and vexatious legal threats. Matthew Gill, defamation specialist at Good Law Project, said in his witness statement that he believes Kamal’s behaviour was intended to cause “harassment, alarm, distress, expense, harm or inconvenience beyond that encountered in properly conducted litigation” – textbook characteristics of a SLAPP.

As well as issuing a legal claim, Kamal has written to Google, Bing and the ICO to try to get Neidle’s article taken down. Kamal also demanded that Neidle say publicly that Kamal is “the leading barrister in the field of taxation in the country” and never make false claims about anyone else ever again.

In his witness statement, Neidle, one of the country’s top tax lawyers, wrote that “this does not feel like ordinary litigation”.

Kamal says that Neidle’s claims – that Kamal had engaged in unethical, unlawful or failed tax avoidance activity, posing a risk to the public, among others – were false and caused harm to his reputation. Kamal claims that Neidle “has attributed a scheme to me which was not devised by me or opined by me at all”.

HMRC has recently added Kamal to its list of tax avoidance promoters. He is the first practising barrister to be put on the list. HMRC believes Kamal “designed four tax avoidance schemes and created contract templates that are essential to how these arrangements operate”.

Kamal’s lawsuit is part of a worrying trend of powerful institutions and wealthy individuals misusing the English legal system to silence journalists and activists. 

We know that the law, in the right hands, can do amazing things. But, in the wrong hands, it can be used to bully and intimidate. And we can’t let that happen. We’ve been working with one journalist who is facing aggressive legal threats in the UK from a bank in Somalia. 

We don’t like it when people use the law to dodge tax, and we don’t like it when people use the law to intimidate journalists into silence. But we have confidence that the law can also defend free speech and be a way to speak truth to power.