Chatham House, the internationally renowned foreign affairs thinktank, has removed a reference to a Conservative party donor from a report on kleptocracy after a threatened legal action for libel, according to a statement made in parliament.
Dame Margaret Hodge, the Labour MP for Barking and former chair of parliament’s public accounts committee, told parliament that Dmitry Leus, a former banker of Russian-Turkmen origin, had threatened to sue Chatham House after he was named in its December 2021 report “The UK’s Kleptocracy Problem”.
Hodge said that Leus was convicted of money laundering in Russia in 2004, and has since sought to describe his conviction as having been overturned. However she said it was in fact “struck off his records so that he could engage in business”.
She continued: “After seven months of increasing demands, and due to the costs of defending the case – estimated at some £500,000 before trial – Chatham House has been forced to agree to his meritless claim and excise the report of all mentions of Mr Leus.”
Hodge also noted Leus’s role as a Conservative donor. Electoral Commission records show he has given £54,500 to the party, including £30,000 to the constituency association of Dominic Raab while he was foreign secretary. He was president of the Conservative association of Runnymede and Weybridge from June 2021 to February 2022.
Leus denies Hodge’s allegation that he or his lawyers behaved improperly. Speaking to the Guardian after her statement, he said his inclusion in the thinktank’s report falsely implied that he was a kleptocrat, meaning an influential person who abuses their political connections in order to steal.
Leus told the Guardian that he had only involved lawyers after several months unsuccessfully seeking to persuade the report’s authors to remove him. “I have never been a kleptocrat,” he said, adding that as a property investor the allegation had damaged his ability to secure loans or carry out business deals.
He said his conviction in Russia had been politically motivated, and his spokesperson Jennifer Morgan reiterated in a subsequent email that it had been struck out. “His conviction is no longer recognised as valid, and he is therefore permitted to be treated as though it did not exist,” she said.
Chatham House confirmed in a statement that a reference to Leus had been removed from the report. “Chatham House has now agreed to remove the references to Mr Leus in the report and a later tweet that referred to him. Mr Leus has indicated that this matter is now closed,” the spokesperson said.
Hodge’s intervention came during an adjournment debate on “lawfare and investigative journalism”. The debate was called by David Davis, the Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, who has repeatedly championed the issue in parliament.
In his own speech, Davis described how claims have been filed against the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, openDemocracy and the Daily Telegraph in respect of journalistic reports on whether entities in the UK were sheltering funds linked to the former dictator of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
“All the news outlets did was ask legitimate questions and try to shine a light on some apparent irregularities and the opaque nature of Nazarbayev’s foundations,” Davis said.
“Defending oneself against a libel claim, especially by an oligarch or other wealthy person, is often cripplingly expensive. In fact, it is typically cripplingly expensive. The risk is not losing the case, which is improbable in most of these cases. The penalty for exponents of free speech is the sheer cost of a vexatious process.”
Leus rejects the suggestion that he or his lawyers had intimidated Chatham House into removing him from its report.
There has been significant concern among anti-corruption activists and campaigners about cases of strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPPs), whereby lawyers abuse the massive costs of the London court system in order to intimidate or financially ruin defendants.
Earlier this year the government announced it would introduce anti-SLAPP legislation. Gareth Johnson, a junior justice minister, told the house on Monday night the government was in the process of drafting legislation to counter SLAPP cases, and would introduce an early dismissal process and a costs protection scheme.
