Kamal v Tax Policy Associates: The first High Court Judgment on the Statutory SLAPP regime

Kamal v Tax Policy Associates Ltd and another [2026] EWHC 551 (KB) is, so far as the judgment records, the first occasion on which the High Court has been asked to consider applying the statutory anti-SLAPP regime introduced by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. Collins Rice J struck out the malicious falsehood claim and parts of the libel pleading, gave summary judgment for the defendants on the whole claim.

By the time Collins Rice J turned to the statutory SLAPP application, the claim had already been disposed of by partial strike-out and summary judgment. It was therefore unnecessary to determine the defendants’ alternative application to strike the claim out as a SLAPP in order finally to dispose of the proceedings. She nevertheless went on to determine it on its merits because the defendants also sought declaratory relief, and because the statutory regime gives independent significance to the court’s determination whether a claim is a SLAPP.

The judgment matters not merely because the claim failed. It matters because it explains what the statutory regime is doing, what its present limits are, and where the real work in the definition of a SLAPP is to be found. It also illustrates the relationship between the new regime and the court’s existing powers of strike-out and summary judgment.

Background

The dispute arose from an article published on 26 February 2025 under the headline “TikTok tax avoidance from Arka Wealth: why the Government and the Bar should act”. The article strongly criticised a tax structure promoted by Arka Wealth, asserted that users would not save tax and would instead incur substantial liabilities, and discussed Mr Setu Kamal’s alleged involvement with the scheme and with earlier tax litigation.

Mr Kamal sued in libel and, in the alternative, malicious falsehood. The defendants responded with an application for terminating relief without trial. They sought strike-out, summary judgment, and relief under the statutory SLAPP provisions.

The sequence is important. This was not a case in which the court turned to the SLAPP regime because no other route of disposal was available. By the time the judge reached the SLAPP application, she had already concluded that the malicious falsehood claim should be struck out and that the defendants were entitled to summary judgment on the whole claim. Even so, she proceeded to determine the SLAPP application on its merits and granted declaratory relief.

The statutory framework

Section 195 of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 defines a SLAPP by reference to four linked conditions. First, the claimant’s behaviour in relation to the matters complained of must have, or be intended to have, the effect of restraining the defendant’s exercise of the right to freedom of speech. Secondly, any of the information disclosed by that speech must have to do with economic crime. Thirdly, any part of the disclosure must be made for a purpose related to the public interest in combating economic crime. Fourthly, some part of the claimant’s behaviour in relation to the matters complained of must be intended to cause harassment, alarm, distress, expense, or other harm or inconvenience beyond that ordinarily encountered in properly conducted litigation.

The judge also referred to the new procedural provisions. CPR 3.4(2)(d) creates a distinct strike-out power where a claim is a SLAPP and the claimant fails to show that it is more likely than not that the claim would succeed at trial. CPR 44.2(9) and (10) provide special costs protection to defendants in SLAPP claims.

The decision therefore makes clear that SLAPP status is not merely descriptive. It carries procedural significance of its own.

How the libel and malicious falsehood claims failed

Before turning to the statutory SLAPP analysis, Collins Rice J dealt with the ordinary applications for strike-out and summary judgment.

The malicious falsehood claim failed first. The court held that malice, being akin to fraud, had to be pleaded with scrupulous care and specificity. The claimant’s attempt to rely on an accumulation of particulars, none of which individually showed the necessary dishonest state of mind, was rejected. The malice pleading was struck out as irremediably defective. In consequence, the malicious falsehood claim stood struck out and, alternatively, had no real prospect of success.

The libel claim failed by a different route. The judge did not determine the ordinary preliminary issues in the conventional way while meaning remained disputed. Instead, she regarded the defendants as over-ambitious in seeking formal determinations of some preliminary issues while reserving their position on meaning. She therefore took the claimant’s pleaded meanings as the high-water mark and asked whether, on that footing, there was any real prospect that the claimant could resist an honest opinion defence.

Her answer was no. There was no realistic prospect that the pleaded meanings would be treated as anything other than expressions of opinion, no realistic prospect that the basis of those opinions was not indicated, no realistic prospect that an honest person could not hold them on the relevant facts, and no real prospect that the claimant could establish that Mr Neidle did not genuinely hold them. Summary judgment therefore followed on the whole claim.

That part of the judgment is of wider interest in its own right. It is a useful illustration of the close relationship between meaning, the fact or opinion distinction, and the statutory defence of honest opinion. It also sits alongside the firm’s wider material on defamation defences and malicious falsehood.

The first limb: restraint of freedom of speech

One of the most important parts of the judgment is the treatment of section 195(1)(a), the freedom of speech limb. Collins Rice J held that, because section 195(2) requires ordinary legal limitations on speech to be ignored for this purpose, most if not all claims in defamation, malicious falsehood or the other communication torts will inevitably satisfy this limb.

That is an important point of principle. A claimant cannot answer a SLAPP allegation simply by saying that the speech complained of was allegedly defamatory and therefore not protected expression. For the purposes of this part of the statutory test, that circularity must be ignored.

The economic crime gateway

The judge also made an important structural observation about the limits of the present regime. She said that having “to do with economic crime” is not intrinsic to the concept of a SLAPP, but is merely the consequence of the legislative vehicle in which the definition has so far been enacted.

That matters because it underlines that the present English regime is not a general anti-SLAPP code applying to all defamation or communication tort claims. At present it is confined to cases that pass through the economic crime gateway.

On the facts, that gateway was satisfied. The defendants relied on suspected cheating the public revenue and the offence of failure to prevent the facilitation of UK tax evasion offences. The judgment is, however, more careful than any crude summary might suggest. Collins Rice J said it was not straightforward to read the evidence as showing a clear belief that the material in the article was itself evidence of the commission of an economic crime. The reasoning proceeded substantially under the alternative limb, namely that Mr Neidle had reason to suspect that an economic crime may have occurred and believed publication of the article would facilitate an investigation into whether it had.

The statute did not require proof that an economic crime had in fact been committed.

The public interest purpose limb

The public interest purpose requirement was also satisfied. The article called on HMRC to investigate and close down the Arka Wealth scheme and advocated broader legal and regulatory reform. The judge emphasised that this is not the ordinary common law or statutory public interest inquiry familiar from other parts of defamation law. The question is whether a purpose of the publication was related to the public interest in combating economic crime, and that purpose does not need to be the sole or dominant purpose.

Section 195(1)(d)

The real centre of gravity of the judgment lies in section 195(1)(d). Collins Rice J said in terms that the SLAPP test is all about how litigation is conducted. The earlier limbs are threshold conditions. The real question is whether some part of the claimant’s conduct in relation to the claim was intended to subject the defendant to harassment, alarm, distress, expense or other inconvenience beyond that ordinarily encountered in properly conducted litigation.

The judge recognised that defamation litigation is often highly adversarial, stressful and personally exposing even when properly conducted. She also made clear that the statutory test is not satisfied merely because a claimant has acted incompetently, inexpertly, carelessly or even serially badly. Mere faults, even serial faults, whether of poor practice, negligence, ignorance, incompetence, hubris or self-deception, do not by themselves necessarily render litigation a SLAPP.

At the same time, the judge held that the analysis must be conducted at a granular level. A claim is a SLAPP in its entirety if the court can properly conclude that any relevant part of the claimant’s behaviour was undertaken with the intention of subjecting the defendant to inconvenience beyond that ordinarily encountered in properly conducted litigation.

That is a significant point. A claimant need not have conducted every aspect of the litigation oppressively. One sufficient instance of intentional misuse may be enough.

The conduct that satisfied the test

The first area in which the test was satisfied was the attempted interim injunction application. Collins Rice J was not prepared to accept that an ostensibly on-notice application, made without actually putting the defendants on notice and without full and candid disclosure, could on the facts be dismissed as mere inadvertence. Had it not been dismissed on the papers, the likely consequence would have been short-notice litigation pressure on the defendants, or a paper order operating before they had been heard. The judge concluded that this conduct more probably than not met section 195(1)(d).

The second area was the claimant’s valuation of the case and the remedies demanded. The judge was not prepared to accept that the deployment of an £8 million valuation, together with unjustifiable and unsustainable compelled-speech demands, was merely a product of inexperience. She accepted the defendants’ evidence that this had a chilling effect on their journalism and inferred that such an effect was more likely than not intended.

The third area concerned attempts to interfere more directly with journalistic activity by seeking access to the defendants’ subscriber base and, more seriously, by trying through formal litigation procedures to obtain source-related information. These attempts were resisted and not pursued to finality, but that did not matter. As the judge put it, the test is not one of cause and effect, but of intention.

Intentionality and its boundaries

There is an important doctrinal observation towards the end of the SLAPP analysis. Collins Rice J said that the intentionality required by the statute occupies a space between negligence or incompetence on the one hand and calculated or strategic dishonesty on the other. She added that there may be cases in which reckless or wilful disregard for, or blindness to, the requirements of properly conducted litigation and their impact on a defendant suffices.

She did not finally define that outer boundary, because on the facts before her she made findings of intentionality at a more conscious level. Even so, the passage is likely to be important in future cases. It suggests that the mental element may prove broader than calculated bad-faith strategy, while still remaining materially narrower than mere ineptitude.

The SLAPP strike out power

The judgment also contains an important explanation of the distinct strike-out power created by CPR 3.4(2)(d). Collins Rice J made clear that a finding that a claim is a statutory SLAPP does not automatically mean it must be struck out. In her words, the fact that a claim is a SLAPP is a precondition for the power arising, not a guide to or a constraint on its exercise.

The separate merits burden remains critical. The claimant must show that it is more likely than not that the claim would succeed at trial. In principle, therefore, an otherwise sound SLAPP claim could continue, albeit subject to the special costs regime.

In this case, however, the claimant could not come close to meeting that burden. By the time the court reached the SLAPP issue, parts of the claim had already been struck out and the remainder had already failed on summary judgment. The claimant had also filed no sworn evidence capable of showing that it was more likely than not that the claim would succeed at trial. The judge therefore held that the conditions for the SLAPP strike-out power were satisfied and that she would have struck the claim out on that alternative basis had it been necessary to do so.

Why the decision matters

The wider significance of the decision is clear. It is not authority for any broad proposition that those who publish material touching on suspected economic crime enjoy a free standing immunity from defamation proceedings. Claimants remain entitled to vindicate reputation, and the substantive law of defamation continues to govern the balance between reputation and free expression.

What the decision does show is that the court will now scrutinise not merely the merits of a defamation claim, but also the way in which the machinery of litigation has been deployed. Improper injunction tactics, inflated valuations, coercive remedial demands, and attempts to intrude upon journalistic sources may matter not simply as unattractive features of correspondence or case management, but as evidence from which statutory SLAPP intention may be inferred.

That may be the deeper significance of Kamal. English law already possessed tools for dealing with weak or abusive claims, including orthodox strike-out, summary judgment and abuse of process. The statutory regime, together with the new CPR provisions, gives that inquiry a more structured form and places the conduct of the litigation itself at the centre of a distinct analysis.

For both claimant and defendant practitioners, this decision is likely to be the starting point for any serious consideration of the present statutory law of SLAPPs in England and Wales. It also has obvious practical relevance for those advising on pre-action conduct in defamation disputes, particularly where urgent applications, source protection, take-down demands and expansive remedial claims are under consideration.

Further reading

• Defamation Solicitors
• Determination of Meaning
• The Honest Opinion Defence in English Defamation Law
• Malicious Falsehood
• Pre-Action Protocol for Media and Defamation Claims