Property development company GHP Securities and its founder Philip Wallis have had their defamation claim against a former employee struck out by the High Court.
GHP and Wallis sued chartered surveyor Justin Meredith for defamation after he alleged in a letter to their solicitors that he believed GHP had sent “two burly men with East European accents” to his home to threaten him in the period after his employment was terminated on 23 December 2009.
However, since the claimants had failed to show any publication of the allegation to someone other than their own solicitors, judge Mr Justice Christopher Clarke said that he had come to the “clear conclusion that these proceedings do not assert a real and substantial tort”.
Striking out the claim, he said: “It would be an abuse of the court’s process to allow them to continue.”
The judge said that, in February 2010, Meredith contacted Wallis to ask about money he claimed to be owed in respect of his notice period and his redundancy.
However, he said that Adam Morallee, a partner in Mishcon de Reya solicitors, wrote back on GHP’s behalf to say that they were investigating what were said to be “various breaches of obligations of confidence and fidelity” owed by Meredith to his former employers.
The letter claimed that Meredith had forwarded confidential and sensitive e-mails from his work account to his wife’s e-mail account, which the judge said was the “commencement of a chain of correspondence which was persistently harsh in tone and belligerent in content”.
In March, Meredith wrote claiming damages in lieu of notice, statutory redundancy, outstanding expenses, and compensation for loss of earnings.
The judge said that this letter ended as follows: “I would also point out that on Wednesday 10 February I telephoned Philip in order to find out why GHP were not paying me what is due. I accept that the conversation got quite heated and resulted in my putting the phone down on him. The very next evening, I answered my front door to two burly men with East European accents who threatened me and told me to ‘phone the man who you have offended and say “sorry”. You have 24 hours’.”
Meredith wrote that he was not in dispute with anybody else, and that it was “not unreasonable to assume that someone at GHP instigated this visit”.
GHP and Wallis sued for defamation over this allegation.
However, the judge said that the only publication in respect of which the action was brought was the publication to Morallee.
He continued: “No other publishee is identified. It is obvious that strenuous efforts have been made to identify another publishee but they have not borne fruit.”
Ruling that there was no “real and substantial tort” in this case, he said: “The publication relied on is to one person only, who is the claimants’ solicitor. I doubt that he is likely to have thought the worse of his client on account of it particularly in the light of his client’s denials. The publication relied on is as numerically minimal as it could get, and was to the claimants’ professional agent, who was acting in respect of a commercial dispute with Mr Meredith. It does not seem to me that the claimants require vindication in respect of such a publication to a solicitor who has been busily engaged in stating that the allegation is false; and that any ‘vindication’ by success in the action will be illusory or, at best, minimal.”
He said that solicitors are routinely the recipients of defamatory imputations about their clients, and that such publication is likely to be covered by qualified privilege or perhaps absolute privilege, so that any claim based on them will in the end be likely to fail.
He continued: “It seems to me that the court is entitled, in the light of the overriding objective and the interests of proportionality, to discourage and prevent the use of its time, at great expense, on actions in which the only publishee is the claimant’s solicitor and thus someone in the claimants’ camp. Even if the claim were to succeed, any damages properly awardable would be likely to be very modest indeed.”
Adding that being sued for defamation was a serious interference with Meredith’s freedom of expression, he said: “He was entitled to express his understandable concerns about what he said had happened, which he did in measured tones, and it was appropriate that he should do so to Mishcon de Reya.”
Wallis and anr v Meredith Queens Bench (Christopher Clarke J) 28 January, 2011
Ian Helme (instructed by Mishcon de Reya) for the Claimants
David Price of David Price Solicitors & Advocates for the Defendant
jess.harrold@estatesgazette.com
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