You don’t have to be Carole Cadwalladr to remember Cambridge Analytica and its questionable use of 87 million individuals’ Facebook data in the 2016 US presidential election. Cambridge Analytica was part of the SCL group of companies bought by Emerdata Limited in January 2018. Cambridge Analytica’s former CEO, Alexander Nix, was caught in a Channel 4 sting boasting about entrapping political opponents with prostitutes and blackmailing them:
Days later, the Information Commissioner’s Office’s shiny jacketed staff raided the SCL group offices in London and the SCL companies filed for bankruptcy protection weeks later. They are now in liquidation.
Not content with losing Emerdata’s investors millions of dollars, Nix had first made sure he was paid $8.775m by Emerdata before the SCL group collapsed. Nix admitted his blame for the failure of the SCL group and he was subsequently banned from acting as a director for 7 years.
Now Nix has resurfaced. In a true display of a sense of entitlement that can only come from an Old Etonian, Nix has sued Emerdata for a further $10 million plus that he has claims he is owed by the company whose subsidiaries he acknowledged to the Directors’ Disqualification Unit his actions destroyed. Guido suspects that Nix will soon to live to regret this chutzpah. Get your popcorn ready.
With Raab settling down into his new job as Justice Minister, Guido hears the Lord Chancellor is setting his sights firmly on the Human Rights Act and ECHR. One of the main focuses of intended reforms will be ending the ability of European Courts to have any say in amending or changing UK legislation, as well as addressing so-called “gold plating”. While the planned reforms under Raab don’t sound like they’ll differ all that much from those planned by Robert Buckland prior to his dismissal, Guido understands the Department is to make a much bigger noise about the battle, ramping up a symbolic fight between the government and Europe on this remaining key sovereignty issue. Brexit 2.0?
Westminster Magistrate’s court has heard claims that Claudia Webbe called a woman a “slag”, made a threat against her involving acid, and threatened to leak her nude photos and videos to her children after developing a friendship with the MP’s partner.
The harassment is said to have taken place over the phone during the period from September 1st 2018 to April 26th 2020. The accuser, Michelle Merritt, claims she received a string of short silent calls from a withheld number whenever she was with Webbe’s partner. On Mothers’ Day 2019 she says the harassment escalated and Claudia confronted her about her relationship with Mr Thomas:
“[Webbe] started calling me a slag and saying friends don’t send pictures of their t*ts and p*ssy to other friends… you’re a slag and you should be acid [sic].”
Despite being warned by officers in April 2019, Webbe allegedly made a further 19 calls to her victim…
On April 25th Merritt phoned Webbe, this time secretly recorded the call. Claudia told Michelle to “get out of my relationship” and repeated the threat to leak Michelle’s nudes to her family. Webbe denies the allegations…
Labour MP Claudia Webbe has her hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court this morning at 10.00, in Court 10, on a charge related to two years-worth of harassing a young woman. Keith Vaz has his fingers crossed…
All the protestors blocking the M25 this morning have achieved is a traffic jam with emissions insulating the area with greenhouse gases. Essex Police say 11 people have been arrested for highway obstruction. For as long as the courts keep treating these protestors with kid gloves they will continue disrupting society and costing businesses millions in losses. The punishment should fit the crime. At the very least businesses should be able to sue the protestors, and their well-heeled backers, to recover losses.
Jolyon and The Good Law Project are pushing for yet another judicial review of government business; this time arguing that the cash for the Levelling Up fund has been unfairly allocated towards Conservative constituencies, and claiming Rishi Sunak’s Richmondshire is being prioritised over more deprived areas like Barnsley. And so Jolyon’s next noble crusade begins…
When the funding plans were announced back in March, council areas were divided into three support categories, with Category 1 areas awarded an initial £125,000 and given support priority over Categories 2 and 3. The formula for allocating the grants was, Rishi said, “based on an index of economic need, which is transparently published by MHCLG and based on a bunch of objective measures.”
Jolyon and his learned friends allege that Rishi’s statement was “inaccurate” – bold talk given Jolyon’s own habit of making “factually incorrect” claims nowadays – and have now been granted a two-day hearing into whether the case merits a full judicial review. The judge who granted the hearing said:
“The grounds are arguable, subject to the observation that the existence of a free-standing principle of a duty of transparency (or good administration) upon which a judicial review challenge can be founded is at best debatable…
However, it is appropriate for the issues about transparency to be explored at the substantive hearing along with the other grounds.”
It is obvious to anyone with half a brain that Jolyon’s lawfare efforts are often merely politics by another means. Perhaps he should go into politics rather than the courts?
