A High Court judge has declared an £8 million libel claim against tax commentator Dan Neidle to be a strategic lawsuit against public participation, the first time the statutory definition under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 has been applied. The ruling reconfigures the landscape for every journalist, FOI practitioner and accountability reporter in England and Wales.
When tax commentator Dan Neidle described claims made by a company called Arka Wealth as “nonsense” on his blog, he likely did not anticipate spending the next period of his professional life dealing with an £8 million libel action. When that action was finally struck out in March 2026, it took something else with it: the distinction between aggressive litigation and the newly codified category of strategic litigation against public participation, known as SLAPP, was made concrete in English law for the first time.
Mrs Justice Collins Rice’s ruling in Kamal v Tax Policy Associates and Daniel Neidle is the first case in which the statutory SLAPP definition under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) has been applied. Its significance reaches well beyond the immediate parties.
What is a SLAPP? Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation describes lawsuits, typically brought by powerful or wealthy claimants, whose primary purpose is not to vindicate a legal right but to silence, exhaust or intimidate the target. Common targets include investigative journalists, FOI practitioners, environmental campaigners, whistleblowers and accountability publishers. The weapon is the litigation process itself: cost, delay and uncertainty, rather than the merits of the underlying claim.
The Case: What Happened
Neidle, a former magic circle partner who built a significant following through his Tax Policy Associates commentary, published analysis critical of an apparent tax avoidance scheme with which barrister Setu Kamal appeared to be associated. Kamal brought a defamation action claiming £8 million in damages.
The conduct of that litigation became as significant as its subject matter. According to submissions before the court, Kamal’s behaviour included applying for an urgent injunction months after publication, seeking what the defendants characterised as disproportionate remedies, mislabelling correspondence, and, in a detail that courts and practitioners will note carefully, relying on generative AI that produced hallucinated case citations. Neidle’s legal team, instructed by the Good Law Project, told the court that this forced them to verify every citation produced by the claimant.
“The judge described Kamal’s conduct as ‘a history of compliance failures’ and his £8 million damages claim as ‘spectacularly inflated’.” – Mrs Justice Collins Rice, Kamal v Tax Policy Associates and Daniel Neidle, March 2026
The judge found that the claim was designed to interfere with the defendants’ journalism beyond Kamal’s arguable entitlements as a defamation claimant. She exercised the court’s power to strike out the claim under the well-established provisions of Civil Procedure Rule 3.4 and, separately, declared the case to meet the statutory definition of a SLAPP under the ECCTA. That dual finding, strike out and statutory declaration, is what makes this ruling a marker in the ground.
The Legal Framework: What ECCTA 2023 Actually Does
The anti-SLAPP provisions in the ECCTA are narrower than campaigners would like. They currently apply only in cases connected to economic crime, a limitation driven by the original legislative context of the Bill, which focused on financial sanctions and oligarch-related litigation. But within that scope, the Act provides a meaningful mechanism: it allows defendants to apply for early dismissal of claims that meet the SLAPP definition, shifts the burden of proof, and provides for cost protection.
The statutory definition requires courts to assess four conditions. The case must involve public interest activity. The claim must be intended to cause harassment, alarm, distress, expense or some other harm or inconvenience to the defendant. That intended harm must go beyond what an ordinary litigant would ordinarily encounter in properly conducted proceedings. And the claim must lack merit, or the claimant must lack a genuine interest in its outcome.
In Kamal, Mrs Justice Collins Rice found all four conditions met. Her framing of the test, that it is “all about how litigation is conducted”, has immediate practical significance. It suggests that the statutory SLAPP analysis is not merely a threshold question to be decided at the outset, but a matter that can be informed by the claimant’s conduct throughout proceedings.
Key statutory provision: Section 195 of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 inserts Rule 3.4(2)(d) into the Civil Procedure Rules, enabling courts to strike out a claim if it meets the statutory SLAPP definition. The provision currently applies only to claims connected to economic crime, a limitation many practitioners argue is too restrictive.
The Limitations: Where ECCTA Doesn’t Reach
Matthew Gill of the Good Law Project, speaking after the ruling, was explicit about what the decision exposes. Anti-SLAPP protection in England and Wales needs to extend beyond economic crime to cover survivors of sexual violence, environmental defenders, and others who face litigation designed to silence them. The statutory framework as it stands leaves a significant gap: a claimant pursuing a SLAPP outside the economic crime context faces the same burden, cost and delay as anyone else.
This matters enormously for the accountability journalism and FOI communities. The most common targets of SLAPP-adjacent conduct are not journalists writing about financial crime, but local reporters, independent publishers, and individuals who use statutory rights, including under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Equality Act 2010, or data protection legislation, to hold smaller institutions to account. For that category of person, the Kamal ruling is a landmark, but it is a landmark on a road whose destination they cannot yet reach.
Courts retain pre-existing powers to strike out vexatious claims and to award costs that act as deterrents. The principles in cases like Jameel v Dow Jones [2005] remain available. But those tools are general-purpose: they lack the specific procedural protections and cost-shifting provisions that make the ECCTA mechanism meaningful.
What the Ruling Means for Journalism and FOI Practice
The most significant element of the ruling, for practitioners thinking about everyday accountability work, is the court’s articulation of what makes litigation a SLAPP: the intention to cause harm beyond that ordinarily encountered in properly conducted proceedings. This framing opens analytical space that goes beyond the formal statutory definition.
Consider what this looks like in practice. An institution subject to an FOI request it finds inconvenient does not typically file a lawsuit, as that would be both unusual and easily identified. But the pattern can take other forms: reporting a requester to police, initiating spurious complaints with regulatory bodies, using data held about a subject in ways that intimidate rather than resolve, or threatening proceedings while making clear the purpose is deterrence rather than remedy. None of these involve formal litigation, but all share the structural logic of a SLAPP: the mechanism deployed is disproportionate to the legal right being asserted, and the purpose is to deter rather than to vindicate.
Understanding that logic, and being able to name it, matters. The Kamal ruling gives practitioners language and authority for arguments that previously had to be constructed from general principles.
For background on UK defamation law and its intersection with public interest reporting, see our earlier analysis: UK Defamation Law and the Public Interest Defence.
A Pattern Recognised in Other Contexts
The case law around harassment and proportionality provides a useful parallel frame. In R v Curtis [2010] EWCA Crim 123, the Court of Appeal established that the threshold for criminal harassment is high: conduct must be oppressive, persistent and unreasonable, going well beyond ordinary friction or robust correspondence. This standard is directly relevant to situations where legal mechanisms, whether civil or criminal, are deployed against people engaged in public interest activity.
The Supreme Court’s analysis in Hayes v Willoughby [2013] UKSC 17 adds a further dimension. Before a person can rely on a “crime prevention” purpose to justify a course of conduct, they must have applied their mind rationally to the matter, forming an evidence-based view rather than an obsessive or self-reinforcing one. Lord Sumption required good faith, a logical connection between evidence and reason, and an absence of arbitrariness. The same rationality standard has obvious application to any actor who deploys legal mechanisms, whether civil or criminal, in ways that appear designed to suppress public interest activity rather than address a genuine wrong.
This publication has direct experience of what it looks like when legal and quasi-legal mechanisms are used in ways that resemble the SLAPP pattern, not through civil litigation, but through conduct that deploys institutional authority disproportionately against a person exercising statutory rights and engaging in legitimate public interest reporting. We have chosen not to detail those specific circumstances here, but they inform our interest in this ruling and our view that the anti-SLAPP framework needs to extend significantly beyond its current scope.
The Hallucinated Citations Problem
It would be remiss not to note the AI dimension of the Kamal litigation. The inclusion of hallucinated case citations in formal legal correspondence, requiring the opposing party to verify every authority produced, raises questions about professional responsibility that go beyond this case. Courts have been increasingly explicit in their expectations. Practitioners who rely on AI-generated legal research without independent verification risk not merely professional embarrassment but findings that their conduct is inconsistent with properly conducted litigation. In the context of the SLAPP analysis, conduct that forces a defendant to expend disproportionate resource checking fabricated citations is not incidental: it becomes part of the factual pattern the court assesses when asking whether harm beyond ordinary litigation has been intended.
The Road Ahead: Reform and Gaps
The Law Commission has previously examined the extension of anti-SLAPP protections, and the Kamal ruling is likely to reinvigorate that conversation. The argument for extending the statutory framework to cover all public interest activity, not merely economic crime, is now substantially stronger. A declaration under the ECCTA provides defendants with procedural protections, cost-shifting and early dismissal that general strike out powers do not. Leaving those protections available only to defendants in economic crime cases creates an arbitrary asymmetry.
For investigative and data journalism, including the kind of FOI-based accountability reporting that this publication undertakes, the gap matters in practical terms. A dataset revealing 277,069 speeding enforcement records in a single year, obtained through statutory FOI rights and published in the public interest, is precisely the kind of activity that anti-SLAPP protections exist to safeguard. That protection should not depend on whether the institution being reported on happens to be connected to economic crime.
The Kamal ruling will be studied by practitioners, campaigners and publishers. It does not solve the problem. But it establishes, for the first time, that English courts are willing to apply the SLAPP label, and to make that declaration permanent in the record. That matters. Naming things accurately is frequently the precondition for addressing them.
Further reading: UK Defamation Law and the Public Interest Defence · Hayes v Willoughby [2013] UKSC 17 · R v Curtis [2010] EWCA Crim 123 · 277,069 Speeding Cases: West Yorkshire Police Data
External sources: Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 · Good Law Project · Freedom of Information Act 2000 · Judiciary anti-SLAPP resources
This article is published for informational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice. All case citations should be verified independently.
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