Putin’s warlord used British lawyers to try to silence me – and the press watchdog indulged him

Yevgeny Prigozhin could not have been clearer in his complaint to The Daily Telegraph. The Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries “does not exist”, and so an article in which I had reported that he was its founder was “inaccurate and misleading”.

He was so indignant that he instructed his London-based solicitor to fire off an 87-page complaint about my reporting to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), the media watchdog.

Far from being a funder of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, he was nothing more than a successful restaurateur, he said, and to prove his credentials as an upstanding citizen he included pictures of himself with George W Bush, Bill Clinton and even the then Prince Charles.

That was in 2021. A year later he finally dropped the pretence, boasting that he had indeed founded the Wagner Group in 2014, something of which he was “proud”.

His admission came too late to save The Telegraph and me from more than six months of wrangling after Ipso saw fit to entertain a complaint from Prigozhin, a man whom Western intelligence agencies had identified as a member of Putin’s inner circle.

My skirmish with Prigozhin fitted into a wider picture of wealthy undesirables using the British legal system and watchdog bodies as a tool to try to bully into silence those who dare to expose them to public scrutiny.

Earlier this week, it emerged that the Treasury had allowed Prigozhin to access funds in the UK despite being subject to sanctions, so that he could pursue a legal case against Eliot Higgins, the founder of the Netherlands-based investigative website Bellingcat.

The libel case was, of course, entirely bogus, and Discreet Law, the British law firm that represented Prigozhin, eventually dropped him as a client, but not before Mr Higgins had run up legal bills of £70,000.

There is even a new acronym for such behaviour: Slapps, which stands for strategic lawsuits against public participation.

On Wednesday, the Treasury said it would consider whether “changes can be made” to the system that allowed Prigozhin to access his money, but on the wider issue of Slapps there has been much hand-wringing from the Government, but little else. In July last year, the Boris Johnson regime announced proposed reforms to give the courts new powers to throw out meritless claims and put a cap on costs, but the plan has disappeared in the long grass, where it seems destined to remain. It means that the likes of Prigozhin can continue to use “legalised intimidation”, as one MP calls it, to keep the public in the dark about their activities.

“In terms of our free media, freedom of speech, these high-priced law firms – through naivety, poor judgement or simple greed – are becoming a fifth column,” says Bob Seely, the Tory MP for the Isle of Wight. “The wider package around [Slapps] includes not only lawyers but legal support services, a euphemistic term for private eyes, cyber-hackers, PR types and so on… the Slapps business model is the means by which bad actors – organised crime, authoritarian states, their oligarch proxies or corrupt corporations – intimidate good actors, whether you agree with them or not; the media, campaigners, think tanks and publishers.”

Discreet Law’s Roger Gherson has said the firm “at all times complied fully with their legal and professional obligations”.

Mr Higgins, who is now hoping Bellingcat can recover its £70,000 by taking legal action against Discreet Law, said Ipso also needed to get its house in order by being more “transparent”.

Prigozhin’s complaint against The Telegraph arose from an article I wrote in April 2021, exclusively reporting that Russia was being accused by intelligence agencies of directly supplying the Wagner Group with fighter aircraft and armoured vehicles for its activities in Libya.

It included quotes from interviews I had done with Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, and US Marine Corps Major General Bradford Gering, and was accompanied by satellite images taken by US Africa Command.

Despite my story having been sourced at the highest levels – as was clear from the article – when Prigozhin complained to Ipso, the watchdog body decided to hear him out, and rather than dismissing his complaint out of hand it required The Telegraph to prepare a response.

In November 2021, the matter was finally resolved when Prigozhin unexpectedly suggested that I should interview him, partly so that he could disprove rumours – referred to in my original article – that he had been dead for two years. It enabled The Telegraph to avoid the cost and distraction of a formal Ipso investigation or, worse still, a legal case which would have been costly no matter the outcome.

Ipso says it has never carried out any formal investigations into complaints by Prigozhin, but declines to say if it reviewed any other complaints from him and concluded they fell within their remit and required a news organisation’s response, in the same way that it did with The Telegraph.

Mr Higgins said: “Ipso needs to be more transparent about how they come to these decisions, and until that’s cleared up there is a huge risk that this will happen again.”

One thing Prigozhin was not lying about when he took on The Telegraph was his roster of famous and powerful customers at his St Petersburg restaurants, chief among whom is Putin himself.

Prigozhin’s letter of complaint to The Telegraph came with “exhibits” attached, such as a brochure for his Concord catering company, which includes a letter from George W Bush thanking him for his hospitality during a visit in 2002 with a handwritten message saying “good luck with your business”. A letter from St James’s Palace, sent by the then Prince Charles’s assistant private secretary James Kidner, passes on the Prince’s thanks for the “wonderful dinner” served by his team in 2003. Other famous faces pictured with Prigozhin in the brochure include Angela Merkel, Stella McCartney, Gwyneth Paltrow and Gerard Depardieu.

Born in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1961, Prigozhin was sent to prison as a teenager for a series of violent muggings carried out as part of a gang, and spent nine years behind bars before being released in 1990, by which time he was 29.

Prigozhin started afresh in the crumbling Soviet Union by selling hot dogs from a stall, and he showed a head for business as well as a talent for networking. He used his profits to invest in a supermarket chain and then opened his own restaurant with his British business partner Tony Gear, who had once worked at the Savoy in London and was at the time managing a hotel in St Petersburg.

His restaurant, the Old Customs House, hired strippers to attract punters, according to The Guardian, but it was the quality of the food that made the bigger impression on customers and he quickly changed tack to market it as the home of fine dining in the city.

It became the place to be seen, and regular diners included the city’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, and his deputy, Putin. When Putin later became president, he often liked to meet VIP guests in his home city, where he would entertain them at the Old Customs House or Prigozhin’s second restaurant, New Island. If top-rank dignitaries came to town, Prigozhin would be chosen to cater events at the Hermitage museum, where he served the then Prince Charles, among others.

Prigozhin’s big financial break came when his company, Concord, landed major government contracts including catering in Moscow’s schools and later for the Russian army.

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Prigozhin’s friendship with Putin, the man he calls “Papa”, took a sinister new turn. Prigozhin is reported to have proposed to Putin the idea of a mercenary army, to give the Kremlin plausible deniability for some of its military activities, and the Wagner Group was born. It went on to operate in Syria as well as Ukraine, racking up multiple accusations of war crimes, as the man known as “Putin’s chef” morphed into Putin’s warlord.

In Russia, those who dared to investigate his activities found themselves on the wrong end of far worse than a stiff legal letter. A severed ram’s head was sent to the offices of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta after it published an investigation in 2018, and a funeral wreath was sent to the home of the journalist who wrote it. Three Russian journalists who flew to the Central African Republic to probe Wagner Group’s presence there were killed in an ambush. Prigozhin has always denied any link to their deaths.

In his complaint to The Telegraph two years ago, he also denied running the Internet Research Agency, a so-called “troll factory” accused of interfering in the US elections through misinformation. He later appeared to confirm he did indeed fund the agency, saying: “We interfered, we interfere and we will interfere.”

In recent months he has been pictured recruiting and addressing Wagner mercenaries, sometimes wearing combat fatigues. Explaining why he sued so many news organisations which correctly reported his Wagner activities, he said: “In any issue there should be room for sport.”

His word for it is “lawfare” – an eloquent expression of the way the super-rich are able to use the law and other structures in Britain to curb free speech.

As Mr Higgins said: “The system is being gamed by people who want to abuse it, and the public needs to understand that. People like Prigozhin can use their wealth to make ridiculous claims knowing that you will still have to pay lawyers to deal with it. So even if you win, you lose.”