We defeated an £8m libel claim – and it shows libel law and the Tax Bar need reform.

In February 2025, we published a report about a firm called Arka Wealth.¹ They’d published hundreds of TikTok videos promoting a scheme that claimed to eliminate all corporate tax, income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax – not just in the UK but across Europe. An unbelievable claim, and all the tax advisers I spoke to – in the UK and across Europe – said the scheme was technically without merit. Many thought it could amount to fraud. But the really surprising part was that the firm was backed by a tax barrister, Setu Kamal, who said in a YouTube video he provided an opinion to all of Arka Wealth’s clients.

Kamal declined to comment on our article, either before publication or immediately afterwards. Months later, he threatened defamation proceedings unless we removed the article, although he was never very specific about what, precisely, his complaint was. He then sent me an email demanding that I pay him 80% of the amount his clients claimed he’d lost in fees, and that I publicly state my “sincere belief” that he is “the leading barrister in the field of taxation in the country”:

There was then a strange episode in August when Kamal tried to obtain an interim injunction against me and Tax Policy Associates but, in a serious breach of court procedure, failed to give us notice of his injunction application. Fortunately the Court rejected the application out of hand. I wrote about that here.

Soon after that, Kamal commenced an £8m defamation claim – again against me and Tax Policy Associates.

We had two responses. The first was traditional: we applied to the court to strike out the parts of the claim that were technically hopeless, and sought summary judgment on the rest. The second was novel: we were the first defendants to rely on the new anti-SLAPP rules in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. I wrote about that here, including Kamal’s court papers and our strike-out application.

The Court issued its judgment today. We won on all grounds. Part of the claim was struck out, and we obtained summary judgment on the rest. The court also held that the case was a SLAPP – had any part of the claim survived the earlier rulings, it would have been struck out on that basis alone.

The judgment is here (or, if you prefer, in Word format here):

Thanks to my brilliant legal team: Matthew Gill and Charlotte Teasdale at the Good Law Project, and to our counsel, Greg Callus and Hannah Gilliland from 5RB. And thanks to the team who initially wrote the report, and everyone who supported us since – particularly Nik Williams, Index on Censorship and the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition.

I’ll update this article with an analysis of the judgment, but will make two points for now: libel law needs reform, and the Tax Bar needs reform.

Libel law chills free speech

First, this demonstrates the two big truths about English libel law.

• Substantive libel law is fairly sensible, and a journalist who writes something that is true and/or opinion should expect to prevail in court.²
• The procedural aspects of a libel claim chill free speech.

Kamal’s claim was hopeless, elements of it were downright abusive (and intentionally so), and his conduct of the claim was incompetent. In other circumstances it would be met with ridicule – but the sum he claimed was so large that I had to take it seriously. It took six months, costs of about £146k, and an 85 page judgment, for me to have the claim dismissed.

For someone without my legal training or financial resources, it would be irrational to have fought Kamal. The rational thing to do would have been to give in, and delete the report. That’s why most libel threats succeed, and we never hear about them: a lawyer’s letter is sent, and the blogger or journalist quietly backs off. That’s a catastrophe for freedom of speech.

But it’s worse than that – it would have been irrational for a national newspaper to carry the story, because it was too niche to justify the editorial time and cost that a libel lawsuit carries. I have nothing but respect for the newspapers that do fight huge libel claims – but they have to pick their fights, and that means small but important stories get missed.

This is the chilling effect of libel law. No other area of litigation has libel law’s potential to damage public life. Libel law enabled Jimmy Savile, Robert Maxwell, Cyril Smith, and many other monsters (note that I’m too cowardly to mention the still-living examples). Rules that are rational in commercial litigation become actively dangerous when they can be weaponised to silence critics of wrongdoing. And so it’s right that we should treat libel law differently from other litigation.

That means dramatically changing the cost equation for defendants. The SLAPP strike-out goes a little in that direction, but even in my case – just about the most favourable imaginable – the cost equation was still brutal. More radical reform is required:

• Make it much harder to bring claims. Right now, you can bring a libel claim without any evidence that a journalist said something false. The journalist has to prove truth (or opinion, or another defence). We should put the onus on claimants: require claimants to prove falsity, and that the publication wasn’t an opinion and wasn’t in the public interest.
• Go further: introduce an American-style requirement to prove malice when the claimant is a public figure.
• Give defendants assurance that, if they win, their costs will be covered. Make indemnity costs the default position.
• Introduce sanctions against claimants who knowingly or recklessly make untrue statements in the course of pursuing a libel claim (whether they ultimately win or lose the claim).
• Or go even further: take defamation out of the court and into informal “alternative dispute resolution” – faster, cheaper, and with no prize for the winner except a declaration that the article was false.

The Tax Bar enables abusive tax schemes

We published a report recently concluding that a small number of barristers were enabling abusive tax avoidance schemes which very possibly could be viewed as fraud, because nobody involved could seriously think the schemes had any prospect of success, and all the companies involved were liquidated as soon as HMRC started investigating.

We now have further evidence of this.

Kamal was claiming £8m in damages because he said he’d had a contract that was worth £8m, which he’d lost as a result of our article. My lawyers, Matt and Charlotte, realised something I’d missed – we were now entitled to ask for a copy of the contract. We received it just a few days before trial.

As the contract was referred to in court, I can now publish it in full:

The document has several extraordinary features:

• Kamal had designed a tax avoidance scheme which supposedly enabled a company, Umbrella Link Limited⚠️³, to hire individuals (and on-supply them to recruitment companies) but avoid accounting for income tax/PAYE on their wages.
• It’s stated that Kamal’s analysis confirms the scheme won’t have to be disclosed to HMRC. The document is also very careful to ensure it remains confidential. That strongly suggests that in fact it had to be disclosed to HMRC. Prima facie, this was an improper arrangement.⁴
• Umbrella Link targeted contractors, often on modest earnings – particularly social workers. We expect most had no idea they were participating in a tax avoidance scheme. These schemes are fundamentally unethical.
• The company paid Kamal £50,000 up-front for the scheme, plus 0.6% of the turnover of the company, and 0.4% for turnover over £8m. The nature of the scheme meant that Kamal was effectively receiving a percentage of the tax avoided.
• The contract was signed on 11 November 2024. Our article on Arka Wealth was published 26 February 2025. But two weeks before that, HMRC had publicly listed the company as operating a tax avoidance scheme and told the company it had unlawfully failed to disclose the scheme to HMRC. The company was doomed from that point.
• On 25 July 2025, HMRC issued a tax avoidance “scheme reference number” to Umbrella Link (with the five month delay probably thanks to delaying tactics from Umbrella Link).
• These companies never defend their tax positions – their (mysterious) ultimate owners just let them fold. So at some point, HMRC presented the company with a tax bill, the company ignored it, and HMRC applied for a winding up petition on 27 October 2025. A winding-up order was made on 10 December 2025.

The narrow point is that Kamal was never going to make £8m from this company. It only had a few months of operation. His claim was abusive, intended to intimidate me. As Mrs Justice Collins Rice said:

Then there is the distinctly troubling matter of the £8m claim valuation and the contract on which it was purportedly based. Mr Kamal told me at one point in his oral submissions that he was going to deal with Mr Callus’s analysis of this document, but he did not do so. The spectacularly inflated figure can to at least some extent conceivably be attributed to Mr Kamal’s ignorance of the law of libel damages and the basis on which they are assessed. Before me he asserted a reserved position on his quantum of (special) damages; he said he had not yet fully pleaded his losses, and at this early stage in the litigation that is not uncommon. But the document in its own terms, and the publicly available information about the company, do not come close to supporting an £8m figure, even without any reference to libel principles. That cannot plausibly be attributed to mistake. It is plain on the face of it that Mr Kamal had inflated the value of his claim, in his sworn particulars of claim, beyond anything he knew he had a realistic prospect of sustaining.

…

I am not prepared either to accept that the deployment of the £8m contract valuation in the context of this litigation was behaviour more likely than not attributable to simple inexpertise, particularly when considered together with the other unjustifiable and unsustainable ‘compelled speech’ remedies demanded. It may be that the Defendants viewed this behaviour with a degree of scepticism because of its very extravagance, and the expertise and advice available to them might well have encouraged that scepticism. But it is plain enough on the face of the documentary evidence that Mr Kamal intended his demands to be taken most seriously and to have a serious impact, and it appears that, to at least some extent, that was borne out in practice.

This may have consequences for Kamal, but there’s a much more important point. Tax barristers (and Kamal is not alone) are entering into contracts which are pure conflicts of interest. There is no “independence” or “integrity” to an opinion that a tax scheme works, when the barrister is paid per pound that goes into the scheme. I find it hard to believe that such contracts are permitted by the Bar Standards Board – if they are, it’s a disgrace, and if they’re not, action should be taken.

Further reading

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