Tax campaigner seeks to strike out £8 m claim as SLAPP over report on disputed tax scheme
Prominent tax lawyer and campaigner Dan Neidle has revealed he is facing an £8 million libel claim brought by tax barrister Setu Kamal over comments made in a report published earlier this year.
Neidle confirmed through his website, Tax Policy Associates, that he had received a formal claim for defamation from Kamal. In response, Neidle has applied to have the case struck out as what he describes as a SLAPP – a strategic lawsuit against public participation – which he argues is intended to silence public interest discussion.
The claim centres on a report posted in February by Neidle that examined a tax scheme promoted by a financial advisory firm called Arka Wealth, which had worked with Kamal. In the report, Neidle warned that anyone using the scheme could face substantial up-front tax liabilities and stated that it should be closed down.
According to the claim form, which Neidle published on his website, Kamal alleges that Neidle’s report implied that he had engaged in unethical, unlawful or failed tax-avoidance activity and that he posed a risk to the public. Kamal strongly denies all such allegations.
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The claim also accuses Neidle of falsely attributing regulatory or legal failings to Kamal and associating him with professional misconduct. Kamal argues that these assertions were untrue and have caused serious harm to his professional reputation, significant disruption to his chambers practice, and exposure to online abuse.
In a statement posted on LinkedIn last month, Kamal said: “Despite [Neidle’s] initial misattributions and inaccurate claims about my professional conduct, subsequent corrections lacked proper acknowledgment or apology. This oversight leaves readers in the dark, potentially misleading those who endorsed his content.”
Neidle has said he does not intend to remove the original report from his website but will make no further comment while legal proceedings are under way.
In his strike-out application, Neidle’s solicitor Matthew Gill, of the Good Law Project, argued that the barrister’s conduct in the litigation had been “intended to cause the defendants harassment, alarm, distress, expense, harm or inconvenience beyond that encountered in properly conducted litigation”.
Court filings show that the defendants’ legal costs up to and including a case-management conference are estimated at around £109,000. Alongside the strike-out application, Neidle’s team has sought an order requiring security for those costs.
The dispute comes as HM Revenue & Customs continues to maintain a public list of promoters, enablers and suppliers of tax-avoidance schemes. The most recent list names Setu Kamal as an individual suspected of involvement in the design of certain schemes, though no findings of wrongdoing have been made.
Kamal has said the publication of his name by HMRC earlier this year came shortly after he had sent a pre-action letter to the Department for Business and Trade as part of separate arbitration proceedings, and that it raised concerns about potential harassment in that context.
The legal confrontation between the two tax professionals has drawn attention within the industry due to its scale and its implications for open commentary on tax practices. Neidle, a former Clifford Chance partner, founded Tax Policy Associates to expose what he regards as harmful or misleading tax schemes and has become one of the country’s most recognisable figures in tax transparency debates.
Kamal, an established barrister with a background in tax and commercial law, insists that the allegations have caused him serious and unjustified harm and that the claims in Neidle’s report were based on inaccurate or incomplete information.
The case is expected to test the limits of the government’s new framework for managing SLAPP-style lawsuits, as ministers have pledged to introduce tighter controls to prevent the misuse of defamation law to suppress public-interest journalism and campaigning.
Both sides await the court’s decision on whether the claim will proceed or be struck out. For now, the dispute stands as one of the highest-value libel actions brought against an individual tax campaigner in recent years.