Tell us why the Treasury allowed a warlord to sue British journalist
To: Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the ExchequerWe the undersigned ask that you make public the results of the internal review of the decision by the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation to help Yevgeny Prigozhin circumvent the UK government’s own sanctions and launch a targeted legal attack on a British journalist.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is the warlord who founded Wagner, a private army that the US government last week announced it would designate a “transnational criminal organisation”. He is not the sort of person who should be receiving any help at all from the UK government.
We are deeply concerned that the UK Treasury issued special licences in 2021 to let the oligarch override sanctions and launch an aggressive legal case against journalist Eliot Higgins in the London courts. Of course, the case collapsed, but Higgins was left with estimated costs of £70,000.
We note that the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, James Cartlidge MP, told the House of Commons that the rules around this decision are being reviewed. We want all the facts of that review made public.