[Federalist] A London court on Wednesday ruled in favor of two Alfa Bank principals in their lawsuit against Christopher Steele’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence, based on falsehoods the former MI6 spy peddled in his dossier.
The claimants in that case, gentleman of Russian and Ukrainian origin, had sued Orbis under the Data Protection Act of 1998, an English law designed to protect computerized personal information. In a 50-plus-page opinion, the court rejected many of the Alfa Bank executives’s arguments, but awarded the duo damages totaling approximately US$45,000 for Steele’s false assertion in the dossier that they had “deliver[ed] large amounts of illicit cash to the Russian president, at that time deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg.”
Along the way to the verdict, the court also revealed some interesting tidbits for Americans still seeking the truth about Spygate. Here’s what we learned:
1. Steele and the FBI Acted Unreasonably
To hold Steele liable under the Data Protection Act, the court needed to find that Steele had acted unreasonably in publishing Memorandum 112 of the dossier, which was dated Sept. 14, 2016, and which falsely accused the Alfa Bank owners of inappropriate relationships and activities with Vladimir Putin. The court first concluded that Steele took reasonable steps to ensure the accuracy of some of the dossier’s propositions, namely those that did not represent “grave allegation[s],” and thus were unlikely to result in anyone taking “any significant step adverse to any of the claimants … without further enquiry.”
But the assertion that the Alfa owners obtained “illicit cash” from Putin was a different matter, the court held, “because it is an allegation of serial criminal wronging over a prolonged period.” Here the court found that the steps Steele took “to verify that proposition fell short of what would have been reasonable.”
“Steele knew that his source did not have direct personal knowledge of the underlying facts, but could only be relying on hearsay,” the court explained, yet Steele “has failed to explain how that information would or could have come to the sub-source by virtue of his job.”
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