We’ve got confirmation now that Barclays obtained a court order in the early hours of Tuesday morning, banning the Guardian newspaper from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax.
It seems Mr Justice Ouseley had his sleep interrupted after Barclays complained about seven documents on the Guardian’s website which had been leaked to the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, Vince Cable.
The Guardian’s solicitor Geraldine Proudler of Olswang (also FT Alphaville’s brief, as it happens) was woken by Ouseley at 2am and asked to argue the Guardian’s case. He then issued an order for the documents to be removed from the Guardian’s website at 2.31am.
But the gag did not extend to the whistleblower’s letter that was earlier sent to Cable. Clearly, Barclays could not argue this was the bank’s property. Here’s an extract:
The last year has seen the global taxpayer having to rescue the global financial system. The taxpayer has already had a gun put to their head and been told to pay up or watch the financial system and life as we know it disappear into a black hole.
It is a commonly held view that no agency in the US or the UK has the resources or the commitment to challenge SCM. SCM has huge amounts of resources, the best minds rewarded by millions of pounds. Compare this with HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs] recently advertising for a tax and accounting expert with the pay at £45,000.
Through the use of lawyers and client confidentiality SCM regularly circumvents these rules, just one example of why HMRC will never, in its current state, be up to the job of combating this business.
One other point. Freshfields, Barclays’ lawyers, appear to have made a fundamental error in this case in that there is no injunction covering the core injunction. The Guardian and other media are therefore free to report that they have been gagged, which rather undermines the whole idea of the gag in the first place.
Tut tut.
UPDATE: the two sides are back in the High Court at 2pm GMT…
Related links:
Barclays gags Guardian over tax – Guardian
A slow motion implosion at Barclays – FT Alphaville