MailOnline has agreed to pay Gabby and Kenny Logan “substantial damages” in relation to an article falsely claiming they had received £500,000 for promoting tax avoidance schemes to their celebrity friends and had sought to disguise the income as loans.
Statements read at the high court on Friday, said the former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie had also agreed to pay substantial damages to the BBC TV presenter and her businessman husband for a tweet he posted about the story.
After the article appeared on 28 February, the Logans submitted a complaint to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso). In a retraction and apology published on 24 May, MailOnline said: “In fact Gabby played no part in the business and earned no income from it. Kenny’s role was solely to introduce clients to companies who promoted legitimate business services rather than tax avoidance schemes. In addition, they did not ‘disguise’ any income from this activity in order to avoid paying tax, as we reported. We apologise for the errors and are happy to set the record straight.”
One of the three statements read on Friday, said MailOnline’s publisher, Associated Newspapers, had agreed to pay the Logans unspecified damages and pay their legal costs.
MacKenzie posted a tweet on 28 February with a video of him embedded in which he said the couple had “admitted that they were effectively commission agents for a tax avoidance scheme”.
He went on: “She [Gabby Logan] is in Qatar [for the men’s football World Cup] where there [sic] BBC are all, ‘God isn’t it all terrible out there’, these people are yeah, it’s not criminal but it is damn close to it and what is happening now is that they are saying they were paid the commission, actually it was put in the books as loans in order to be, make it, more ‘tax efficient’ so they were at it every single possible way … The bottom line is, how shocking is it that they would use their fame to encourage people to go down a route which was in the end going to cost them tens of millions of pounds; beyond shocking, beyond shocking that she could appear on our BBC screens every night.”
A statement read in court said: “The true facts are that although Kenny was a brand ambassador for a company that sold financial products which included tax avoidance schemes and earned commission for making introductions, neither Gabby or Kenny Logan ever promoted tax avoidance schemes, either to their celebrity friends or anyone else. Still less did they admit to so doing. Neither did they receive commission of £500,000 for this alleged activity. The suggestion that through their actions, victims of a tax avoidance scheme at issue lost ‘tens of millions of pounds’ is also false.”
It said MacKenzie had deleted the tweet and agreed to indemnify the Logans for their legal costs as well as paying damages.
Gwilym Jones, a director of the litigation investment company, Henderson & Jones Limited, who was quoted in the MailOnline article, also agreed to pay damages to the Logans and indemnify their legal costs.
