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Putin’s warlord planned new legal attack on BBC with UK government help

Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads the notorious Wagner army, sought to attack the BBC two months before the Ukraine invasion

By Jim Fitzpatrick
Putin’s warlord planned new legal attack on BBC with UK government help
Yevgeny Prigozhin, sanctioned head of the Wagner mercenary army and close ally of Vladimir Putin, was planning to sue the BBC with UK government help | Mikhail Svetlov, Getty Images
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Vladimir Putin’s private warlord, the sanctioned oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, was planning to launch a legal attack on the BBC with the same UK government help that had enabled him to sue another British journalist, openDemocracy can reveal.

Prigozhin’s solicitors at London firm Discreet Law received UK government permission to target Eliot Higgins of investigative website Bellingcat in August 2021. By December they were preparing to escalate action with new permission from the government to sue the BBC as well.

openDemocracy revealed in January how a department of the UK Treasury, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), had previously authorised lawyers from Discreet Law to receive payment direct from the sanctioned oligarch in Russia, and had even approved business class flights to St Petersburg for them to meet him and stay in five-star accommodation.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0