HomeInsightsHigh Court awards damages for defamatory online publication and harassment

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The claimant, Andrew Guise, and the defendant, Rajeev Shah, entered into a business relationship, which was undocumented. Ultimately, there was a dispute over remuneration and the two men fell out.

Mr Shah then set up a website at “andrewguise.com”, on which he made various allegations about Dr Guise, which Dr Guise contended were inaccurate and defamatory. Dr Guise retaliated by publishing allegations about Mr Shah on a website at “rajeevshahdental.com”.

Dr Guise issued proceedings against Mr Shah for libel, harassment and for infringement of the Data Protection Act 1998. Mr Shah counterclaimed with claims for harassment and for infringement of the DPA against Dr Guise. The claims under the DPA were made in respect of the inaccuracies alleged on both websites. Both Dr Guise and Mr Shah alleged that they had been harassed by the other.

Mr Shah pleaded justification in defence of Dr Guise’s libel claim. Mr Justice Dingemans found that only some of the statements made by Mr Shah on the andrewguise.com website were justified. In particular, the allegation that Dr Guise had sought to “scam” Mr Shah was found to be untrue. Therefore, he said, the defence failed as a whole, but the partial justification could still be reflected in damages.

In Dingemans J’s view, it was apparent that Mr Shah had published serious defamatory statements about Dr Guise by stating that Dr Guise had perpetrated or sought to perpetrate a confidence game or other fraudulent scheme, especially for making a quick profit, which was a swindle on Mr Shah, and that Dr Guise had acted for Mr Shah despite a conflict of interest, and had so caused a potentially major investor in Mr Shah’s business to withdraw, and that Dr Guide had lied by deliberately misrepresenting himself as being associated with Mr Shah’s company when he was not.

Taking all these matters into account, Dingemans J held that an appropriate award of damages was £25,000 for libel. However, he said, the award would have been “very substantially higher” but for the part justification. A substantial reduction was required to reflect what had been proved to be true, but the award needed to be of this size to reflect the fact that the most serious imputation (i.e. the allegation of Dr Guise perpetrating a scam) had not been justified.

As for the DPA claims, Dingemans J held that both Mr Shah and Dr Guise had published incorrect and inaccurate, as well as correct and accurate, statements about each other. Neither Dr Guise nor Mr Shah had taken reasonable steps to ensure the accuracy of the data which they had published, Dingemans J said, they had simply been interested in making themselves appear the wronged party, and the other party look correspondingly worse. There was nothing fair about the processing of data by either party. The specific inaccuracies, however, did not seem to cause either Dr Guise or Mr Shah any relevant distress, save for that for which Dr Guise had been compensated for by the award of damages in libel. Dingemans J therefore made no award of damages in respect of the DPA: in his view, the judgment provided a sufficient record of what statements were inaccurate and there was no distress.

However, because both websites contained inaccurate information and because both parties had “shown themselves capable of acting very unreasonably” and, further, had both lied in court, Dingemans J granted an injunction restraining further publication of the websites in their current form.

As for the harassment claims, Dr Guise argued that Mr Shah had harassed him within the meaning of the Harassment Act 1997, because of the publication of the “andrewguise.com” website and also because Mr Shah had arranged to send round a man to Dr Guise’s home address, when his wife and child were at home, whose presence was designed to intimidate him. Mr Shah denied the latter, but Dingemans J accepted the evidence of Dr Guise’s wife and found that the incident had indeed taken place and that Mr Shah had been behind it. In Dingemans J’s view, this, together with continued publication of the website, amounted to a course of conduct, which crossed the line to amount to harassment under the 1997 Act. Dingemans J found that an award of £3,000 damages was appropriate in the circumstances.

Dingemans J dismissed Mr Shah’s claim for harassment against Dr Guise. (Andrew Guise v Rajeev Shah [2017] EWHC 1689 (QB) (6 July 2017) — to read the judgment in full, click here).