The council admits it used public resources to hire the Queen’s solicitors to make threats of libel action on behalf of Tony Newman and Jo Negrini.
STEVEN DOWNES, Editor of Inside Croydon, writes that in doing so, the council’s senior legal staff may have broken the law
Tony Newman: he used council resources to threaten libel action against this website
Official accounts show that last year Croydon Council paid £25,434 to Harbottle and Lewis, a firm of solicitors who more usually act on behalf of the Queen.
While the records made public by the council fail to specify what Harbottle and Lewis’s services involved, the timing of these payments coincides exactly with the period when the solicitors had been writing multiple letters to Inside Croydon to threaten libel action on behalf of Tony Newman and Jo Negrini, who were at the time the leader of the council and its chief executive.
Inside Croydon robustly rejected the threats made by Harbottle and Lewis’s high-powered legal team. All the articles mentioned in their complaints on behalf of Newman and Negrini remain published, unaltered, on this website.
Indeed, particularly in the case of our reporting of Newman’s failure to go to the police over a violent sexual assault against a young woman by one of his councillor colleagues, this website had a public interest defence prepared and was ready to give evidence in the High Court.
Now, nearly two years later and after repeated excuses, refusals and delays, Croydon Council has recently managed to respond to a Freedom of Information request and a direction from the Information Commissioner which ordered them to release the internal correspondence involving Newman and Negrini and Harbottle and Lewis. Continue reading
