How DO they
Geraldine Proudler boasts a formidable reputation in the upper echelons of Britain’s legal profession. a senior partner at giant london firm CMS, where she specialises in such fields as defamation and ‘crisis management’, her gilded CV namechecks former clients including Tom Cruise and Phillip Schofield and quotes legal handbooks that dub her ‘sophisticated,’ ‘tough,’ ‘effective’ and ‘shrewd’.
These qualities are nothing if not lucrative. Paid up to £1.3 million a year, her firm’s 375 partners last year shared profits of £173 million (an average of nearly half a million each).
Proudler, who is reputed to charge almost £1,000 an hour, is one of the organisation’s top assets. That in turn allows the 65-year-old solicitor and her husband, also a successful lawyer, to live in considerable grandeur in a £5million house in Chelsea, where she is regarded as a pillar of the local community.
a member of the Chelsea Society, Britain’s poshest residents’ organisation, she once lobbied the council over plans to open an organic street market opposite her home (insisting that the view from its sash windows would be ‘substantially damaged’).
lately, she’s burnished her metropolitan credentials as chair of the Board of Governors of Middlesex university and the Guardian newspaper’s non-profit foundation.
So far, so fragrant. Yet all good things must come to an end. and the blue-chip lawyer’s bubble of privilege was rudely punctured this week when she found herself in need of exactly the sort of ‘reputation management’ she has for years provided so expensively to clients.
on Tuesday night, Proudler, and the way she made her millions, were thrown to the centre of the bitter public debate over russia’s invasion of ukraine.
Bob Seely MP used a Parliamentary debate on sanctions to name Proudler as one of four ‘amoral’ solicitors who have grown rich by teaming up with ‘Putin’s henchmen’.
in a speech, Mr Seely alleged these lawyers offer a ‘one-stop corruption shop’ to serve questionable oligarchs furthering their interests by waging ‘lawfare’ in the British courts.
The Tory backbencher — speaking after Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, urged the uK to call out the Kremlin’s ‘white-collar collaborators’ — argued that the
Her firm has an office in Moscow
This week in the Commons, a Tory MP named and shamed the British lawyers he said earned fortunes helping silence critics of Putin’s cronies. Now read this gripping investigation into their activities they’d prefer you weren’t able to read
four were among lawyers who have corrupted the British justice system over recent years by helping wealthy russian clients intimidate rivals, undermine free speech and silence the Press.
‘it’s a very serious situation that our legal system has become so corrupted,’ said Mr Seely.
‘You’ve got to wonder that the reputations these people are going to end up with in a few years’ time… Perhaps they’re all really lovely people, but perhaps their morality is going to bite their reputations in a way that will be uncomfortable, and i wonder, deputy Speaker, how we have allowed this to happen?’
Seely’s speech named Proudler — whose firm has an office in Moscow which, at the time of writing, remains open for business — for her recent work on behalf of Mikhail Fridman and Petr aven, two oligarchs who were this week sanctioned by the eu, in a highly controversial defamation case that played out in london before Christmas.
He also named three other prominent lawyers who worked on the same case, in which the publisher HarperCollins was sued over the contents of a book called Putin’s People.
They were: John Kelly, a solicitor at Harbottle & lewis who acted for roman abramovich; Hugh Tomlinson QC, a barrister instructed by abramovich; and nigel Tait, who represented the russian oil giant rosneft, whose chairman igor Sechin is one of Putin’s closest allies.
(Tait, who once declared ‘i am the man who suppresses free speech,’ is a partner at Carterruck, whose other recent clients include Gennady Timchenko, a grizzly russian gas magnate sanctioned by the uK last month.)
The Putin’s People case, which was eventually settled out of court, saw HarperCollins agree to correct a number of claims in the book that were said to be inaccurate, including the allegation that abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003 on the orders of Vladimir Putin.
The author and former FT Moscow correspondent, Catherine Belton, also issued an apology.
Though some of the disputed claims were trivial, the cost to the publisher of defending the case (which followed Belton’s book being endorsed by jailed russian opposition leader alexei navalny) was quite the opposite. HarperCollins incurred a reported £1.5million in legal fees.
no fewer than 19 free-speech organisations described the litigation as ‘legal harassment’ designed to ‘bully’ critics into silence.
Seely agrees. ‘a free Press should be intimidating kleptocrats and criminals,’ he said. ‘Why have we got to this position in our society — a free society, the mother of Parliaments — where we have kleptocrats, criminals and oligarchs intimidating a free media?
‘We have a coalition not of the willing, but of the woeful. oligarchs, Putin’s henchmen, team up with amoral lawyers… We know the oligarch model… these firms set up a one-stop corruption shop to offer a form of legalised intimidation to silence not only their rivals, but journalists and authors.’
He appears to have support in downing Street, too: deputy PM dominic raab said this week that recent events have convinced the Government to curb defamation and libel laws.
‘We will not have people close to Putin coming here to try and bankrupt people who shine a light on his excesses. it’s about oligarchs and kleptocrats who get together and try to sue people.’
it should be said that, while Proudler has not commented on Mr Seely’s remarks, all three of the others disagree with his interpretation of their work and deny being responsible for legal harassment.
Carter-ruck said it ‘denies Mr Seely’s allegations in the strongest possible terms’. The firm said that it condemns the russian government’s decision to invade ukraine. ‘We are not acting for, and will not be acting for, any individual, company or entity associated with the Putin regime in any matter or context, whether sanctions-related or otherwise.’
Harbottle & lewis said, ‘we do not act as he alleged’. and
Tomlinson’s representative described the MP’s assertions as ‘baseless and false’.
Meanwhile, the law Society argued: ‘The job of solicitors is to represent their clients, whoever they may be, so that the courts act fairly. This is how the public can be confident they live in a country that respects the rule of law, unlike Putin’s tyrannical regime.’
Crossbench peer lord Pannick has also defended his profession, insisting that oligarchs are, like murderers, ‘entitled to legal representation in court, however reprehensible their alleged conduct’.
Pannick, who is a QC, perhaps has a dog in this fight, though: he represented Putin crony arkady rotenberg in a 2016 sanctions battle with the eu.
Wherever one stands, the whole thing has brought the role of the legal profession’s relationship with some of ‘londongrad’s’ most questionable inhabitants into sharp focus.
it has been roughly 25 years since bafflingly wealthy ‘businessmen’ from former Soviet kleptocracies began to colonise our capital city. during that period, aggressive law firms have become expert in
‘London, the global capital of dirty money’