Last Tuesday, I awoke to an email from the High Court, rejecting an attempt to silence me with an interim injunction. This came as a surprise, because I’d no idea anyone had applied for an injunction.
This was an “on notice” injunction application – but I had received no notice. What kind of lawyer would do that?
The “leading tax barrister in the country”
The injunction application was brought by a tax barrister called Setu Kamal.1Mr Kamal was a member of Old Square Tax Chambers until November 2024. He is now based in Cyprus and practices on his own.
Mr Kamal is unhappy with our report about him and Arka Wealth, the tax avoidance scheme promoter he worked with and helped promote.2Arka Wealth appears to have ceased business since our report. The related firm Benedictus Global may still be in business, although its website hasn’t been updated for a while – it still lists Mr Kamal as a member of Old Square. Mr Kamal claims our report costs him £1m every year in lost business. Back in May, Mr Kamal threatened to sue me unless I published my “sincere belief” that he is “the leading barrister in the field of taxation in the country”:
![In light of the reputational harm caused, which easily passes the threshold of “serious harm” under Lachaux v Independent Print Ltd [2019] UKSC 27, I require the following steps to be taken within 7 days:
Publication of a clear and public confirmation of your sincere belief that I am the leading barrister in the field of taxation in the country, as previously stated, and a sincere apology for your misleading and disparaging remarks;
Retraction or substantial amendment of the headline and body of the article so as to remove the defamatory implications it currently conveys;
Publication in full of my letter to the Information Commissioner, together with acknowledgment of the outcome of the BSB investigation;
Written confirmation that you shall apply higher editorial standards in the future, and that no further false or misleading references to any persons will be made in your publications;
Undertaking to make the following payment: you shall undertake to pay 80% of any amounts which my regular or historic clients represent to you, in writing, as amounts they would have paid to me under an engagement with me, but did not do so because of your publications.
Should you fail to take these steps, I will proceed without further notice to pursue all remedies available to me, including injunctive relief, damages, and costs.
Yours sincerely,
Setu Kamal](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/image-2-2000x1102.png)
I did not do as asked. Mr Kamal is not, in fact, the leading tax barrister in the country.
Mr Kamal’s practice
On 4 September 2025, HMRC named Mr Kamal as responsible for promoting and designing tax avoidance arrangements, saying he has created contract templates that are “essential to how these arrangements operate”.
It’s HMRC’s view, shared by me and (I believe) most other tax advisers, that these schemes do not work.
This is a very unusual step by HMRC, and the first time a barrister has been named as a tax avoidance scheme promoter.
The “on notice” application, without notice
On 13 August, Mr Kamal asked my solicitors if they’d accept service of a defamation claim; they said they would. Six days later, without telling us, he applied for an interim injunction (representing himself, without a lawyer).
Here’s Mr Kamal’s application to the court:3I have omitted the witness statement, because I am probably prevented from publishing it at this point, under CPR 32.12.
This was an “on notice” application. This means that, as is fairly obvious from the title, the other side has to be given notice of the application.4As opposed to a “without notice” (or ex parte) application, which is reserved for cases of extreme urgency where alerting the respondent would defeat the purpose of the injunction (e.g., they might destroy evidence). An applicant in a “without notice” hearing is under a strict duty of “full and frank disclosure” to the court, meaning they must present all relevant facts, even those unhelpful to their case. The Civil Procedure Rules couldn’t be clearer, and even a simple Google search reveals the answer in seconds:

After I received the court order, my solicitors wrote to Mr Kamal asking what he thought he was doing (at that point we hadn’t seen the application, and didn’t really know what was going on).
Mr Kamal’s reply was that he simply had no idea that an “on notice” injunction required notice:

This is word salad. A barrister shouldn’t be relying on a solicitor to understand a simple CPR point. But I’m going to take Mr Kamal at his word, and accept that this was not a malicious attempt to mislead the court and obtain an injunction on the sly, but merely incompetence.
I asked Stephens Scown about this and received a slightly mysterious reply, which may (or may not) be a denial that they advised Mr Kamal that no notice was required:

The defective application
Incompetence is the most plausible explanation, because the entire injunction application was defective.
You can’t apply for an interim injunction before issuing proceedings, unless the matter is urgent, or an interim injunction is “otherwise desirable in the interests of justice”. Mr Kamal doesn’t appear to be aware of this requirement, but it doomed his application. Our report was published in February, but Mr Kamal didn’t apply to the court until August – that hardly suggests urgency.
That’s just the start of Mr Kamal’s problems. English courts have resisted interim injunctions that restrain freedom of speech ever since Bonnard v Perryman in 1891.5Bonnard v Perryman [1891] 2 Ch 269 is a cornerstone of free speech protection in English law, long pre-dating the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, This principle has been consistently upheld, for example in Greene v Associated Newspapers Ltd [2004] EWCA Civ 1462. Before Greene, there was some debate whether section 12 of the Human Rights Act limited Bonnard v Perryman.– Greene confirmed it did not. There remains, however, an ongoing effort by claimant libel lawyers to argue that the principle is contrary to the ECHR, on the basis that the right to freedom of expression in Article 10 should be balanced with the right to reputation included in Article 8. Such an injunction will only be granted if it is clear that the statement is unarguably defamatory, and that no defence is possible. Again, Mr Kamal doesn’t seem to be aware of this.
There are then other oddities. The extreme vagueness of his draft order – what, exactly, was I supposed to delete? The absence of the required undertaking by the applicant of an interim injunction to pay damages if so determined by the court. The general sloppiness, with the draft order giving me a deadline that expired a month before he applied for the injunction.
For all these reasons, Mrs Justice Steyn rejected the application without a hearing, saying:

Here’s the full judgment:
I’m expecting to hear more from Mr Kamal soon.
Many thanks to my solicitors at the Good Law Project.
- 1Mr Kamal was a member of Old Square Tax Chambers until November 2024. He is now based in Cyprus and practices on his own.
- 2Arka Wealth appears to have ceased business since our report. The related firm Benedictus Global may still be in business, although its website hasn’t been updated for a while – it still lists Mr Kamal as a member of Old Square.
- 3I have omitted the witness statement, because I am probably prevented from publishing it at this point, under CPR 32.12.
- 4As opposed to a “without notice” (or ex parte) application, which is reserved for cases of extreme urgency where alerting the respondent would defeat the purpose of the injunction (e.g., they might destroy evidence). An applicant in a “without notice” hearing is under a strict duty of “full and frank disclosure” to the court, meaning they must present all relevant facts, even those unhelpful to their case.
- 5Bonnard v Perryman [1891] 2 Ch 269 is a cornerstone of free speech protection in English law, long pre-dating the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, This principle has been consistently upheld, for example in Greene v Associated Newspapers Ltd [2004] EWCA Civ 1462. Before Greene, there was some debate whether section 12 of the Human Rights Act limited Bonnard v Perryman.– Greene confirmed it did not. There remains, however, an ongoing effort by claimant libel lawyers to argue that the principle is contrary to the ECHR, on the basis that the right to freedom of expression in Article 10 should be balanced with the right to reputation included in Article 8.
12 responses to “An incompetent attempt to silence me by tax barrister Setu Kamal”
I recently watched the program “V11” and I was dismayed that so many innocent people had been given suspect advice and had suffered catastrophic financial losses but were still being chased by the HMRC yet those that gave the advice prospered and were not punished.
I wonder what steps the BSB has taken to investigate, if any, given the HMRC notice.?
Dan
Stephens Scown LLP comments rather fit the pattern of confusion and ignorance of the law as shown in their Companies House filings.
If/when you next write to them you might like to remind them of 14 day requirement for notification of changes that they have ignored for years; and perhaps enquire why their PR blurb (and his Linkedin entries) show Steve Panton was appointed “Regulatory Partner” in April 2023 (https://www.insidermedia.com/news/south-west/new-partner-for-stephens-scown) more than 2 years before they reported it as being 1st May 2025 – far be it from me to suggest that solicitors are backdating documents…. but it wouldn’t be the first time.
As you have noted so many times, Companies House non-compliance is always a “leading indicator of….”
Always enjoyable to see how the various mugs, shysters, fraudsters, chancers and others are given a kicking by Dan Neidle. Required reading for HMRC
I’m tickled by the words in the judgement “….any such fresh application would have to meet the very high threshold I have identified” since the threshold doesn’t appear to be any more than address the defects in the procedure and the defects in the application. I.e. we will consider your application if correctly submitted.
though to be fair some of the defects cited in the full Order text seem to be unaddressable.
Thanks again for exposing at the least these incompetents ( or downright corrupt?) exponents of business practices.
Is this indicative generally of public and corporate life where the loss of corporate memory which occurred as a result of the Covid pandemic ( both those who sadly lost their lives or left the business world) and now chickens are roosting.
You can’t easily fix a combination of arrogant and stupid
You are being very generous to the aspiring Applicant. You are giving him free advice which will prevent him receiving a bit of a judicial wigging if he runs with this. Maybe you can offer to call him Leading Something or Something Tax Counsel but not a the same time.
The leading Poster of Stupid Comments. Not fishing. I know I am.
Thank you for giving me today’s reason to giggle. There are so many fools and crooks one crosses in the tax world, but some are more foolish than others..
You make it so easy to spot the fools, and I do enjoy your clarity and reason!
Can you – or any other interested party – refer Mr Kamal to the Bar Council or other relevant regulatory body? If I – as a chartered accountant – behaved so ineptly, I would definitely be referred to the ICAEW for potential disciplinary action
Imagine if he was regulated by the ICAEW. Given their conduct in one of Dan’s recent reports, they might sanction him to the tune of about two quid.