“At the point at which my firm was instructed by the Claimant, it was understood that the processing of the Claimant’s personal data by the Defendants was ongoing. Despite this, it was recognised that it was possible that the Defendants would seek to raise issues relating to limitation given it was known that the Defendants were first commissioned to compile the intelligence reports that would become known as the Steele Dossier in or around June 2016 and the Steele Dossier became known to the world at large when published on the BuzzFeed website on10 January 2017 . In these circumstances, a protective claim form was issued and sealed on26 October 2022 … Having issued the Original Claim Form, the Claimant was required to serve his claim on the Defendant by25 February 2023 .”
“This is a claim for breach of Article 5(1)(d) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (‘UK GDPR’) arising from the processing of inaccurate personal data of which the Claimant is the data subject: (1) Compensation pursuant to Article 82 of the UK GDPR and s.168 and 169 of theData Protection Act 2018 . (2) An Order pursuant to Article 16 of the UK GDPR that the Defendants rectify the inaccurate Personal Data and/or an order under Article 17 of the UK GDPR that the Personal Data is erased. …”
“Any person who has suffered material or non-material damage as a result of an infringement of this Regulation shall have the right to receive compensation from the controller or processor for the damage suffered.”
“Whilst we acknowledge that the relevant legislation has changed since the above claim was brought, the underlying principles remain the same and we believe our client’s claims will result in the same outcome.”
“This is a claim for breach of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (‘UK GDPR’) and/or theData Protection Act 1998 . The Claimant claims: (1) Compensation pursuant to Article 82 of the UK GDPR and s.168 and 169 of theData Protection Act 2018 . (2) Compensation pursuant tos.13 of the Data Protection Act 1998 [.] (3) An Order pursuant to Article 16 of the UK GDPR and/ors.167 of the Data Protection Act 1998 that the Defendants rectify the inaccurate Personal Data and/or an order under Article 17 of the UK GDPR that the Personal Data is erased. …”
“9. Memorandum 2016/080 contains the following personal data of which the Claimant is the data subject: (a) The Claimant has engaged in perverted sexual behaviour including the hiring of prostitutes to engage in ‘golden showers’ in the presidential suite of a hotel in Moscow. (b) The Claimant engaged in such perverted behaviour in order to defile the bed in which President and Mrs Obama had slept; and (c) By his unorthodox behaviour in Russia the Claimant had provided the Russian authorities with sufficient material to blackmail him. 10. Memorandum 2016/113 contains the following personal data of which the Claimant is the data subject: (a) The Claimant paid bribes to Russian officials in order to further his business interests. (b) The Claimant took part in ‘sex parties’ when in St Petersburg; (c) The Claimant arranged for or conspired in the silencing of all direct witnesses to his impropriety by coercion or bribery.” (a) The Claimant has engaged in perverted sexual behaviour including the hiring of prostitutes to engage in ‘golden showers’ in the presidential suite of a hotel in Moscow. (b) The Claimant engaged in such perverted behaviour in order to defile the bed in which President and Mrs Obama had slept; and (c) By his unorthodox behaviour in Russia the Claimant had provided the Russian authorities with sufficient material to blackmail him. (a) The Claimant paid bribes to Russian officials in order to further his business interests. (b) The Claimant took part in ‘sex parties’ when in St Petersburg; (c) The Claimant arranged for or conspired in the silencing of all direct witnesses to his impropriety by coercion or bribery.”
“(i) The Claimant did not engage in perverted sexual behaviour and did not hire of [sic] prostitutes to engage in ‘golden showers’ in the presidential suite of a hotel in Moscow; (ii) The Claimant did not take any steps to defile the bed in which President and Mrs Obama had slept; (iii) The Claimant did not engage in unorthodox behaviour in Russia and did not act in which a way [sic] that Russian authorities were provided with material to blackmail him; (iv) The Claimant did not pay paid [sic] bribes to Russian officials in order to further his business interests; (v) The Claimant did not take part in ‘sex parties’ when in St Petersburg; and (vi) The Claimant did not arrange for or conspire in the silencing of all direct witnesses to his impropriety by coercion or bribery.”
“(1) Damages including aggravated damages pursuant to section 13 of the DPA 1998. (2) Compensation pursuant to Article 82 of the UK GDPR and section 168 of the DPA 2018[.] (3) A Compliance Order under s.167 of the DPA 2018 requiring the Defendant to erase and/or restrict further processing of the Personal Data. (4) Further or other relief.”
“(a) The processing of false, intrusive and damaging allegations about the Claimant’s personal life. (b) The Claimant was compelled to explain to his family, friends and colleagues that the embarrassing allegations about his private life were untrue. This was extremely distressing for the Claimant. (c) The Defendant’s dissemination of the Personal Data in the Memoranda to Fusion and other third parties, the scope of which remains unknown to the Claimant at this time. (d) The processing of false allegations about the Claimant’s private life, which were presented in sensationalist manner and calculated to cause tremendous embarrassment to the Claimant, who is a well-known figure in the public eye. (e) The Claimant had suffered damage to his reputation as a consequence of the Defendant’s processing of the Personal Data by disclosure to the individuals set out at paragraph 8 above [i.e. Mr Talbott, Mr Kramer and a UK government national security official].”
“(1) A party may amend their statement of case, including by removing, adding or substituting a party, at any time before it has been served on any other party. (2) If his statement of case has been served, a party may amend it only – (a) with the written consent of all the other parties; or (b) with the permission of the court.” (The meaning of the term “statement of case” includes “a claim form”:CPR 2.3 (1).) (a) with the written consent of all the other parties; or (b) with the permission of the court.”
“(1) If a party has amended their statement of case where permission of the court was not required, the court may disallow the amendment. (2) A party may apply to the court for an order under paragraph (1) within 14 days of service of a copy of the amended statement of case on them.”
“Amending a claim form to specify a cause of action not previously mentioned therein does not raise a new cause of action if the amendment is made simply to resolve an obvious inconsistency between the claim form and the particulars of claim served with it. In deciding whether the amendment raises a new cause of action the court should consider the proposed amendment in the context of the statements of case as a whole, not just the claim form by itself.”
“In my view the just approach is to look at the totality of the documents served. These documents together set out the claimant’s pleaded case. There was an obvious mismatch, but in asking whether the proposed amendment was, in truth, an amendment to raise a new cause of action or merely to clarify an internal inconsistency in the pleaded case is, it is proper to look at the pleaded case as a whole. When one does so, it is clear, in my judgment, that what was sought to be done by the subsequent application to amend was not, in substance, to raise any new claim at all, but merely to correct an obvious formal error. I reject the argument that an amendment to correct that clerical error was prohibited by rule 17.4 and, in my judgment, there was nothing to prevent the court from exercising its general discretion to do justice in response to the application to strike out the particulars of claim.”
“In my judgment, on the ordinary rules of interpretation, the court would say that the words ‘abuse at work’ in a claim form are an obvious clerical error which can been corrected, as a matter of interpretation, to accord with their objective meaning in the context or in the light of the factual matrix – namely, accident at work. The interpretative exercise which is needed is as simple as substituting for the word ‘abuse’ the word ‘accident’.”
“The decisions below represent a stark surrender of substance to form. We should not allow such a thing unless irresistibly driven to do so. For the reasons given by Toulson and Arden LJJ, we are not so driven.”
“… The reasoning is found in the judgments of Toulson LJ at para 26 and Arden LJ at paras 30-32 and is to the effect that the claim form, when read with the benefit of the particulars of claim served with it, contained an obvious clerical error. That meant it could be corrected as a matter of interpretation and hence that to substitute ‘an accident’ for ‘abuse’ in the claim form was not in truth to raise a new claim at all but to correct an error in expression of the claim that had been brought all along. That seems to me to be a particular application of two well established principles applicable to the interpretation of documents, namely (i) that documents intended to be read together can be read together, and (ii) obvious mistakes can be corrected as a matter of interpretation. I have no difficulty with either proposition, or their application to the circumstances of that case, but they do not seem to me to establish Mr Onslow’s proposition or have any direct bearing on the present case. There is here no difficulty in interpreting the amended claim form. It is clearly worded and no one has suggested that it is ambiguous, let alone that it contains a clerical error that can and should be corrected by reference to the particulars of claim.”
“There are significant differences between the current case and Evans’ case. The first is that the particulars of claim were not served with the claim. The second is that no explanation is provided by either solicitor for Corelogic as to whether there was any error (clerical or formal) as such. Although service of the particulars of claim was deferred by agreement, it is absolutely clear that this pleading was to a significant degree informed by the contents of Bristol’s letter of30 April 2013 and the thought process which had gone into the response of9 May 2013 . It is rather difficult, on ordinary interpretation rules, therefore to say that the claim form drafted some ten weeks before can be interpreted by reference to the later document. For instance, statutes and contracts are not interpreted by reference to what was said or done after the contract was entered into or after the statute was enacted and there is no reason to think that a claim form can sensibly or properly be interpreted by reference to a later document and particularly one which has been drafted by reference to what has been said or has emerged after the claim form was drafted and issued in the first place. There was no doubt in Evans’ case that there had obviously been some clerical or formal error in the drafting of the claim form. However that is not the case here.”
“(i) Is it reasonably arguable that the opposed amendments are outside the applicable limitation period? (ii) Did the proposed amendments seek to add or substitute a new cause of action? (iii) Does the new cause of action arise out of the same or substantially the same facts as are already in issue in the existing claim? (iv) Should the Court exercise its discretion to allow the amendment?”
“In this case, a decision under s.10 would surely require at least some consideration of the issues that would arise if the claim had been framed as a libel action… Otherwise, the law would lack coherence.”
“If the claim for reputational loss had been pursued by means of a claim in libel it would have been time-barred, and it is clear the defendant would have taken the point. An application to disapply the limitation period might have been made, but the claimant would have had to overcome the strong rule in the authorities, that such applications should only rarely succeed. He would also have had to persuade the court that it was just and equitable to make an order that would negate the ‘single publication rule’ in section 8 of the 2013 Act, by which Parliament sought to protect publishers from rolling liability for online content. To allow the same loss to be claimed by reliance on a different tort would remove any such obstacles, and so far from being necessary in a democratic society would seem to be inconsistent with the manifest intention of Parliament.”
“there would in my opinion be merit in a general rule that a claimant who seeks to clear his name of a defamatory imputation arising from a wrongful disclosure of private information, and to recover damages for reputational harm, should be required to bring a claim in defamation.”
“53 Before us, it was argued that a new claim sufficiently ‘arises out of’ the same facts as an existing claim if there is a sufficient nexus between the old and the new claim, in the sense that some or a substantial part of the facts relied on to promote the new claim were relied on to promote the old claim. That takes far too broad an approach to the rule, which it effectively rewrites. The new claim does not arise out of the facts on which the old claim was based if, in order to prove it, new facts have to be added. That is why this court has said that the basic test is whether the plea introduces new facts: Goode v Martin[2002] 1 WLR 1828 , para 42. 54 The additional possibility that the new facts are substantially the same as those already relied on is limited P & O Nedlloyd BV v Arab Metals Co[2005] 1 WLR 3733 , para 42, per Colman J, to: ‘something going no further than minor differences likely to be the subject of inquiry but not involving any major investigation and/or differences merely collateral to the main substance of the new claim, proof of which would not necessarily be essential to its success.’” ‘something going no further than minor differences likely to be the subject of inquiry but not involving any major investigation and/or differences merely collateral to the main substance of the new claim, proof of which would not necessarily be essential to its success.’”
“… if it appears to the court – (a) that the statement of case discloses no reasonable grounds for bringing or defending the claim; (b) that the statement of case is an abuse of the court’s process or is otherwise likely to obstruct the just disposal of the proceedings; or (c) that there has been a failure to comply with a rule, practice direction or court order.”
“(a)… that the party has no real prospect of succeeding on the claim, defence or issue; and (b) there is no other compelling reason why the case or issue should be disposed of at a trial.”
“(2) An application underCPR 3.4 (2)(a) calls for analysis of the statement of case, without reference to evidence. The primary facts alleged are assumed to be true. The Court should not be deterred from deciding a point of law; if it has all the necessary materials it should ‘grasp the nettle’: ICI Chemicals & Polymers Ltd v TTE Training Ltd[2007] EWCA Civ 725 , but it should not strike out under this sub-rule unless it is ‘certain’ that the statement of case, or the part under attack discloses no reasonable grounds of claim: Richards (t/a Colin Richards & Co) v Hughes[2004] EWCA Civ 266 [2004] PNLR 35 [22]. Even then, the Court has a discretion; it should consider whether the defect might be cured by amendment; if so, it may refrain from striking out and give an opportunity to make such an amendment. (3) Rule 3.4(2)(b) is broad in scope, and evidence is in principle admissible. The wording of the rule makes clear that the governing principle is that a statement of case must not be ‘likely to obstruct the just disposal of the proceedings’. Like all parts of the rules, that phrase must be interpreted and applied in the light of the overriding objective of dealing with a case ‘justly and at proportionate cost’. The previous rules, the Rules of the Supreme Court, allowed the court to strike out all or part of a statement of case if it was ‘scandalous’, a term which covered allegations of dishonesty or other wrongdoing that were irrelevant to the claim. The language is outmoded, but I agree with [Counsel for the Defendant] that the power to exclude such material remains. Allegations of that kind can easily be regarded as ‘likely to obstruct the just disposal’ of proceedings. (4) ‘Abuse of process’ is a sub-set of category (b). An abuse of process is a significant or substantial misuse of the process. It may take a variety of forms. Typical examples are proceedings which are vexatious, or attempts to re-litigate issues decided before, or claims which are ‘not worth the candle’ (Jameel v Dow Jones & Co Inc[2005] EWCA Civ 75 [2005] QB 946 ). But the categories are not closed.”
“i) The court must consider whether the claimant has a ‘realistic’ as opposed to a ‘fanciful’ prospect of success … ii) A ‘realistic’ claim is one that carries some degree of conviction. This means a claim that is more than merely arguable … iii) In reaching its conclusion the court must not conduct a ‘mini-trial’… iv) This does not mean that the court must take at face value and without analysis everything that a claimant says in his statements before the court. In some cases it may be clear that there is no real substance in factual assertions made, particularly if contradicted by contemporaneous documents … v) However, in reaching its conclusion the court must take into account not only the evidence actually placed before it on the application for summary judgment, but also the evidence that can reasonably be expected to be available at trial … vi) Although a case may turn out at trial not to be really complicated, it does not follow that it should be decided without the fuller investigation into the facts at trial than is possible or permissible on summary judgment. Thus the court should hesitate about making a final decision without a trial, even where there is no obvious conflict of fact at the time of the application, where reasonable grounds exist for believing that a fuller investigation into the facts of the case would add to or alter the evidence available to a trial judge and so affect the outcome of the case … vii) On the other hand, it is not uncommon for an application under Part 24 to give rise to a short point of law or construction and, if the court is satisfied that it has before it all the evidence necessary for the proper determination of the question and that the parties have had an adequate opportunity to address it in argument, it should grasp the nettle and decide it. The reason is quite simple: if the respondent's case is bad in law, he will in truth have no real prospect of succeeding on his claim … Similarly, if the applicant's case is bad in law, the sooner that is determined, the better. If it is possible to show by evidence that although material in the form of documents or oral evidence that would put the documents in another light is not currently before the court, such material is likely to exist and can be expected to be available at trial, it would be wrong to give summary judgment because there would be a real, as opposed to a fanciful, prospect of success. However, it is not enough simply to argue that the case should be allowed to go to trial because something may turn up which would have a bearing on the question of construction …”
“and was, for the purposes of processing which occurred up to25 May 2018 , a data subject within the meaning ofs.1(1) of the Data Protection Act 1998 (“the DPA 1998”).” ii) POC §3: “s.1(1) of the DPA 1998 and/or”. iii) POC §8. The whole of this paragraph addresses dissemination of the Dossier, including the Memoranda, which is of no relevance to the UK GDPR / DPA 2018 claim. iv) POC §12: “is sensitive personal data for the purposes of the DPA 1998. It further constitutes”. v) POC §13: “preparing the Memoranda, disseminating copies of them to third parties,”. vi) The subheading above POC §14 “Personal Data Processed up until25 May 2018 ”. vii) POC §§14-15. These paragraphs address duties under the DPA 1998. viii) POC §16. This paragraph alleges breaches of duties arising under the DPA 1998. Subject to the Strike Out Application, §20(d), which repeats §16(c) in the context of the claim for breach of the UK GDPR, would need to be amended to incorporate particulars regarding inaccuracy currently pleaded in §16(c). ix) POC §21: “personal and reputational damage and” x) POC §22: “the DPA 1998 and/or” xi) POC §§22(b), (c), (d) and (e). Although these subparagraphs appear in a paragraph that is addressing the existing claim, as well as the DPA 1998 claim, each is obviously dependent on the existence of a claim in respect of preparation and/or dissemination of the Personal Data. Subparagraph (b) alleges the Claimant was “compelled to explain to his family, friends and colleagues that the embarrassing allegations about his private life were untrue”
“Damages including aggravated damages pursuant to section 13 of the DPA 1998.”
“Article 82 1. Any person who has suffered material or non-material damage as a result of an infringement of this Regulation shall have the right to receive compensation from the controller or processor for the damage suffered.”
“21. By reason of the Defendant’s breaches of his data protection rights, and in particular, the Defendant’s processing of his inaccurate personal data, the Claimant has suffered … distress. 22. In support of his claim for damages under … the UK GDPR and/or the DPA 2018 the Claimant will rely on the following: (a) The processing of false, intrusive and damaging allegations about the Claimant’s personal life.” (a) The processing of false, intrusive and damaging allegations about the Claimant’s personal life.”
“The inaccurate personal data in the Dossier has, and continues, to cause me significant damage and distress. As I have indicated, although the Defendant is not, in law, responsible for the media publication of the Dossier to the world at large, it recorded and circulated the data in this document. If the Dossier had not been created by the Defendant, the inaccurate personal data would never have entered the public domain. I believe that as the creator of the Dossier the Defendant bears, at the very least, moral responsibility for its content and should therefore, correct the inaccurate data it contains. Such a correction would make the true position clear. It is now clear to me that the only way that I can fully demonstrate the total inaccuracies of the personal data in the Dossier is to bring these proceedings and to prove, by evidence at trial, that the data are false. A judgment of the English Court on this issue will be an immense relief to me as it will completely confirm the position to the public at large. Until there is such a judgment, I continue to suffer damage and distress as a result of people wrongfully believing that the data in the Dossier is accurate.” (Emphasis added.)
“Although an award of damages is the principal remedy in a tort claim, there is no reason to conclude that compensation is its only valid function. The vindication of the claimant’s rights, a public acknowledgement that the claimant has suffered a wrong, may be just as important a social value for the law of tort to uphold.”
“(1) An individual who suffers damage by reason of any contravention by a data controller of any of the requirements of this Act is entitled to compensation from the data controller for that damage.”
“A claimant has no cause of action in negligence unless he has suffered injury or damage. By contrast, battery or trespass to the person is actionable without proof that the victim has suffered anything other than the infringement of his right to bodily integrity: the law vindicates that right by awarding nominal damages.”
“1. The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller restriction of processing where one of the following applies: (a) the accuracy of the personal data is contested by the data subject, for a period enabling the controller to verify the accuracy of the personal data; (b) the processing is unlawful and the data subject opposes the erasure of the personal data and requests the restriction of their use instead; (c) the controller no longer needs the personal data for the purposes of the processing, but they are required by the data subject for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims; (d) the data subject has objected to processing pursuant to Article 21(1) pending the verification whether the legitimate grounds of the controller override those of the data subject. 2. Where processing has been restricted under paragraph 1, such personal data shall, with the exception of storage, only be processed with the data subject’s consent or for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims or for the protection of the rights of another natural or legal person or for reasons of important public interest.” (Emphasis added.)