The UK has nothing so crude as censorship: oligarchs cannot have British journalists arrested for writing the truth about their stolen fortunes. Britain has a far subtler system.
Instead of journalists being told what to do, we are threatened with seven-figure legal fees, so we preemptively avoid any discussion of oligarchs known to be litigious. The result is the same as you would find in an authoritarian country – oligarchs are left in peace to enjoy their hard-stolen wealth, undisturbed by tiresome publicity – but the way Britain gets there is so much more… sophisticated.
This week it was revealed that openDemocracy is being sued – alongside the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Telegraph and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) – after reporting on a fund linked to the former Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev that controlled billions through a UK-registered company. The case has been described as ‘an egregious example of a SLAPP’.
