Following up on this post, there’s been a surprisingly good parliamentary debate on the practice of using bogus lawsuits to intimidate journalists and MPs, which touches more than I expected on the impact of kleptocracy in British politics.
I have some objections to this – where was Liam Byrne on this when he was a Treasury minister, for one, and I am deeply suspicious of the concept of “lawfare”, invented during the Iraq era to delegitimize anyone who expected the Americans to respect international humanitarian law – but it’s a start, and they did at least touch on Tory funding.
That said the only reason I can see for the MPs involved to go as far as they have is that this time, somebody inconvenienced their own interests, and that someone was the fabulous Mohammed Amersi.
Back in the dawn of time when this blog was much better read, I covered one of his TeliaSonera deals in the ex-Soviet Union, that later ended up with billion-dollar fines and Swedish phone company people going to jail, for Mobile Communications International and I remember their very reputable PR agency pointing me to an “independent blog” about the case. It turned out they had faked the whole thing but hadn’t thought to register the domain name somewhere other than their office address.