A CARMARTHENSHIRE blogger faces financial ruin after the County Council and its Chief Executive began proceedings to recover damages and costs from her, despite an indemnity underwriting those costs being ruled unlawful.
Jacqui Thompson lost a libel claim against Mr James and the County Council, while Mr James won a counter-claim for defamation against her, and an appeal failed.
Four months ago, the local authority reported Jacqui Thompson to Dyfed-Powys Police, alleging harassment and a further allegation of perverting the course of justice.
The local force has declined to explain why it feels able to investigate allegations made by its Chief Executive and the local authority, when the investigation of the unlawful payments made by the council to Mr James were passed on to Gloucestershire Police due to the close working relationship between the authority and Dyfed- Powys Police.
As appears distressingly common in cases involving West Wales’s councils, Dyfed-Powys Police are taking an inordinate amount of time to investigate what should be straightforward allegations. It is over four months since the police opened their inquiry. An investigation involving grants fraud in neighbouring Pembrokeshire has resulted in no arrests after almost two-and-a-half years since the original report to the force. The fraud concerned is not complex, despite police claims to the contrary.
Mr James is pursuing Jacqui Thompson for payment of £190,390 for the council’s costs, plus a balance of £30,913 in damages to Mr James himself (the original award of £25,000 plus interest at 8% a year), Bailiffs’ fees of around £4,000 were also payable but, according to Jacqui, ‘seem to have been dropped following their unsuccessful attempt at recovery’. The bailiffs had not found goods worth seizing.
Jacqui Thompson cannot afford to pay, because her legal insurers, Temple Legal Insurance, revoked the after-the event policy which would have protected her financially in case she lost, following the libel trial verdict given by Mr Justice Tugendhat who had concluded that she had made a misleading statement, following an interpretation of a remark that she had never published an untrue comment regarding the council, while drawing attention to the terms of an apology to the opposite effect in another defamation case brought against her by former Head of Carmarthenshire Planning, Eifion Bowen.
The Judge’s words allowed the insurers to void the contract of insurance.
MORE LEGAL THREATS
In April 2016, Jacqui Thompson received a letter from solicitors acting for Mr James personally, saying that he intended to ask the High Court to start contempt of court proceedings against her, and also informing her that Mr James has asked police to investigate if she can be prosecuted for the crime of harassment. She learned later that an investigation for perverting the course of justice was also being considered.
If the case reaches court, and Mrs Thompson is subsequently found guilty, she could be jailed.
Matthew Paul, barrister and Conservative candidate for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in May’s elections for Welsh Assembly elections, went public with opposition to the council’s continuing pursuit of the blogger. Commenting in The Herald on April 22, 2016 (p.22), Matthew Paul wrote:
“The High Court’s judgement (and that of the Court of Appeal) in Thompson v. James was badly wrong. It would have been entirely possible to find that neither party had libelled the other, and that the case was an immense waste of court time and public money. Mr Justice Tugendhat should have ruled that Thompson’s comments made on the blog were plainly political, and protected both by the common law and Art. 10 of the ECHR [Article 10, on freedom of expression, in the European Convention on Human Rights]. Quite independently of the EU, our own courts failed lamentably in this case to protect free expression.”
PLANNING PROBLEMS…
AND MORE
Jacqueline (Jacqui) Thompson, married to forestry contractor Kerry Thompson and living in the countryside between Llanwrda and Caio, started to feel that the county’s planners discriminated against them.
In 1990, the Thompsons had received permission for a forestry contractor’s bungalow dwelling at Cae Brwyn, Llanwrda, and for an agricultural implement shed.
On three occasions between 2004 and 2007 (applications E/06601, E/17614, E/09739), the Thompsons applied for permission to construct a bungalow, with an agricultural tie restricting its value on the open market, for Kerry Thompson’s brother Eddie, a forestry co-worker. All three applications were refused, and so was an application in 2006 (E/11853) for a temporary mobile home on the plot intended for the bungalow. The final rejection, signed by senior development control officer Graham Noakes and dated December 18, 2007, said that ‘insufficient information has been provided to demonstrate that there is a proven local affordable housing need. The proposal would therefore create a form of unacceptable sporadic development in the open countryside’.
Yet in the following year, 2008, less than a quarter of a mile up the lane from Cae Brwyn, Carmarthenshire’s planning committee approved application E/20004 from CR and DM Griffiths of Betws, Ammanford, for a ‘single storey dwelling or a dormer bungalow’ in open countryside, on land which had been fragmented more than a decade earlier, when the farmhouse, buildings and 34 acres at Hafod Tafolog were sold off ‘to enable further land to be bought and to make the business more viable’, according to the council’s planning appraisal. One of the reasons given for the approval was the policy permitting a dwelling required for people engaged mainly in agriculture, a category which includes forestry. Despite the permission, to date this dwelling has not been built.
NO TRIAL BY JURY
Jacqui Thompson expected a jury trial. It did not happen. It was listed as a jury trial. The International Forum for Responsible Media blog, dated January 16, 2013, listed upcoming media law cases for January to March, and said: “There is one jury trial, in the case of Thompson v James, listed for seven days beginning on 11 February, 2013. This is a claim brought by the author of the Carmarthenshire Planning Problems blog, Jacqui Thompson, against the Chief Executive of Carmarthenshire Council in relation to a letter dated 28 July, 2011. Mr James has brought a counterclaim for libel, funded by the local authority.”
Yet just before the trial was due to start, Mr Justice Tugendhat decided that there would be no jury. The Judge’s decision to refuse jury trial, late in the day, was an unwelcome surprise to both Jacqui Thompson and her legal team.
MR JUSTICE TUGENDHAT’S JUDGEMENT
The boundary between free speech and libel is somewhat of a movable feast. A great deal depends on the judge’s assessment of motives.
Mr Justice Tugendhat could not discern any motive other than a wish to harass Mr James and the County Council – not genuine political comment, not a desire to inform the public.
In Mr Justice Tugendhat’s opinion, Mrs Thompson had engaged in an unlawful campaign of harassment, defamation and intimidation targeted against Mr James and other council officers (paragraph 423 (i)), and her motive was revenge (paragraph 406). The judge’s decision that the motive was revenge, following the County Council’s refusal of applications for planning permission for a forestry worker’s bungalow, seems to stem from the fact that he could not see any other possible motive.
APPEAL FAILS
Permission to appeal against the judgement was refused, except for one small point relating to the interpretation of a term used by Mrs Thompson to describe the arrangements the council made to bankroll Mr James’s defence and counterclaim.
The council’s decision to allow public money to indemnify libel claims brought by staff or councillors was declared unlawful by the Wales Audit Office in January 2014.
The council has never appealed the Auditor Office’s finding and was shot down in flames when it questioned the qualifications of the auditor concerned earlier this year.
While Jacqui Thompson fell foul of the law of defamation as it applied at the time of the court action involving Mark James, the law has since changed.
In addition, as evidence of inconsistencies in Carmarthenshire County Council’s planning decisions have come to light it is at least arguable that her initial grievance about Carmarthenshire’s planning system would be worthy of deeper probing. That is a subject to which The Herald will return next week.
WE HAVE NO OPTION,
SAYS COUNCIL
The Herald asked Carmarthenshire County Council three questions:
Is the Chief Executive considering whether to draw a line under the past litigation and stop pursuing Mrs Thompson for a bill which is larger than her total financial resources?
In what ways does pressing Mrs Thompson for payment benefit the council’s reputation in Wales and the wider UK?
Is the council not concerned that the current police investigation into Mrs Thompson for harassment and perverting the course of justice could make it appear excessively hostile to criticism, in the eyes of the general public?
In response, the council has issued the following statement: “Mrs Thompson initiated the action after bringing defamation proceedings both against the council and Mr James in his capacity as its Chief Executive. This action was defended and won overwhelmingly.
“Costs would usually have been recovered from Mrs Thompson’s insurers; however, they withdrew from this citing a lack of good faith on her part.
“The council therefore had no option other than to pursue Mrs Thompson directly for the costs incurred after successfully defending itself in proceedings brought by her.
“It is standard procedure for the council to pursue any debts against it, it has the responsibility to the council taxpayer to do so.
“Whether Mrs Thompson has the means to pay will be something for the court to consider.”
The council has never mentioned that its Chief Executive had offered to settle the action brought against him by Mrs Thompson before the council spontaneously offered him an indemnity in relation to his costs.
Mr James is one of Wales’s highest paid local authority Chief Executives.
Add Comment