Mohamed Amersi v Charlotte Leslie & Anor.

For the purposes of Defamation Act 2013, section 1, serious harm is assessed by reference to the impact of each publication. A claimant cannot aggregate alleged reputational damage from separate publications to meet the statutory threshold.

Where a defamatory statement is published to a small number of identified persons, a claimant will ordinarily need evidence that the particular publication caused, or is likely to cause, serious harm in the eyes of the relevant publishee. Inference remains available, but it must rest on evidence rather than speculation. Alleged republication must also be causally linked to the publication sued on.

A proposed amendment advancing an evidentially unreal serious-harm case will be refused, and a composite plea which does not particularise serious harm publication by publication is liable to be struck out.

The claimant brought a libel claim concerning memoranda published by the first defendant in late 2020 and early 2021. He alleged that the memoranda made serious allegations about his background, business dealings, political donations and proposed involvement in a Conservative Party Middle East organisation.

After claims concerning unidentified recipients were stayed, the claimant applied to amend his Particulars of Claim to particularise serious harm arising from publications to six identified recipients. The defendants applied to strike out the original composite plea of serious harm.

The central issue was whether the claimant had a real prospect of proving, separately for each publication, that it had caused or was likely to cause serious harm to his reputation.

1. The claim was dismissed. Permission to amend was refused because the proposed allegations of serious harm had no real prospect of success. The existing composite plea of serious harm was struck out under CPR Part 3.4(2)(a).

2. Under section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013, the relevant question is the actual or likely reputational impact of the publication sued on. Following Banks v Cadwalladr [2023] EWCA Civ 219, every publication is a separate cause of action. A claimant cannot establish liability for a publication which caused no serious harm merely because another publication, or a group of publications, caused serious harm.

3. Although small-scale publication can in principle cause serious harm, this was a case of discrete publications to identified people. The claimant had supplied no direct evidence from any recipient supporting serious harm. The available evidence instead showed that the recipients either did not form the pleaded adverse view, had formed their view for other reasons, did not republish the memoranda, or could not distinguish any effect of the memoranda from later press coverage.

4. An inferential case remains possible, but it must be evidentially grounded. The claimant could not proceed to trial in the hope that cross-examination, disclosure or other material might produce supporting evidence. Nor did the evidence of wider circulation establish that serious reputational harm was caused by any pleaded original publication. The claimant’s own circulation of a memorandum and rebuttal letter, and the subsequent media coverage, created further causation difficulties.

5. The original Particulars of Claim did not comply with CPR PD 53B paragraph 4.2(3). They advanced a composite case rather than separate particulars of serious harm for each publication. As the proposed amendments failed substantively, no further opportunity to replead was justified. The court also concluded that further allocation of court resources would not serve the overriding objective.

This was a first-instance decision.

• High Court: a related data-protection claim was initially brought under Part 8, transferred to Part 7, and discontinued before trial.
• High Court (King's Bench Division): the claimant's defamation claim was dismissed after refusal of the proposed amendments and strike-out of the existing plea of serious harm.