Home Office ministers were accused of shelving an independent report on fraud in February, the Financial Times reported at the time. It had been expected that the report, written by Jonathan Fisher KC and completed last December, would be published before the government unveiled its fraud strategy at a global summit in Vienna in March.
We “will publish it, along with a government response, in due course”, the Home Office promised in February. As indeed they did, slipping it out on Tuesday during the busiest week of the Whitehall and Westminster year.
What was it about Fisher’s proposals that persuaded ministers to sit on them for more than six months? And why did a Home Office minister suggest this week that ministers would only “now consider them carefully and will respond in due course”?
The report — Fraud in the Digital Age — runs to 280 pages. It strikes me as entirely persuasive. But you can see from my analysis in today’s Law Society Gazette why ministers wanted to bury some of its 47 recommendations. To read today’s column, click here and then click anywhere on the right-hand page.
Trump v BBC
President Trump has narrowed down his defamation claim against the BBC. He has agreed to drop proceedings against two subsidiaries that the BBC has always argued had nothing to do with the case, BBC Studios Distribution Limited and BBC Studios Productions Limited.
Lawyers on both sides have agreed that the action against these companies should be “dismissed with prejudice, with each party to bear its own costs and attorney’s fees”. A court document filed yesterday adds that “President Trump shall continue prosecuting his causes of action against defendant British Broadcasting Corporation”.
No reason was given for the development. But the court in Florida reacted immediately by ordering the remaining parties to indicate by Monday whether their disputes over “discovery” — disclosure of documents — “remain ripe or… are moot”.
Earlier this week, the United States government challenged some of the BBC’s disclosure requests. It said they imposed “an undue burden on the non-party federal government respondents” and argued that BBC “should have examined and exhausted [existing public] sources of information before subpoenaing non-party federal entities and officials”.
Karim Khan KC
The lawyer at the International Criminal Court who accuses the suspended prosecutor Karim Khan KC of sexually assaulting her has spoken on television for the first time. She was interviewed on camera by Christiane Amanpour of CNN and her comments are reported in the Guardian.
Identified only by her first name, Sarah, she described Khan’s behaviour as “an escalation of attempts”. She said “it was kind of like encroachments on the boundaries slowly — not just physically, but emotionally as well”.
Sarah, who is 39, served as Khan’s direct special assistant between 2023 and 2024. She is from Malaysia and worked at the court for several years before being invited to join Khan’s top team. She remains a court employee.
Next Friday, the court’s member states will convene at the UN headquarters in New York for an unprecedented vote on whether to remove the prosecutor from office. He denies the allegations.
Legal peers
Congratulations to a bumper crop of legal peers, announced yesterday.
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Top of the list is Sir Brian Leveson, whose main job these days is investigatory powers commissioner. His cross-bench peerage may come as some consolation for the decision by Liz Truss, as lord chancellor in 2017, to block Leveson’s expected appointment as lord chief justice by insisting that the job should go to someone no older than 65. His forthcoming ennoblement also retrospectively validates the all-too-common solecism perpetrated by those unfamiliar with the judicial title held by male judges in the Court of Appeal. And it may also make up for what’s expected to be Andy Burnham’s watering-down of the jury reforms that Leveson recommended last year.
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Next comes Barbara Mills KC, former chair of the bar and joint head of chambers at the leading family set 4PB. She specialises in difficult, complex and sensitive cases concerning children, mainly in high-conflict cases featuring allegations of serious abuse and parental alienation. Mills was appointed as a deputy High Court judge in 2023 but I’m not sure whether she can continue to sit judicially if she is to take the Labour whip.
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And there are peerages for Parvais Jabbar MBE and Saul Lehrfreund MBE, co-founders and long-serving co-directors of the Death Penalty Project at the law firm Simons Muirhead Burton. Their legal action charity provides free legal representation to prisoners around the world, using the law to stop offenders being put to death.
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Finally, Sir Sadiq Khan is a former solicitor. The mayor of London was a partner at Christian Fisher from 1997 to 2004.