Former Chelsea chairman awarded £150,000 damages after High Court libel battle

Former Chelsea Football Club chairman Ken Bates has been awarded £150,000 in damages following a High Court libel battle over claims, published in a magazine, that he had rivals “murdered”.

Mr Bates brought legal action against journalist Tom Rubython and BusinessF1 Magazine, of which Mr Rubython is the director and majority shareholder after he was profiled in a piece titled “The biggest ‘wrong-un’ in sport” in May 2023.

Deputy High Court Judge Aidan Eardley KC said in a ruling on Friday that the businessman claimed the article included allegations that he had “directed the murder of business rivals, in order to further his business interests” and “illegally and fraudulently asset stripped Chelsea Athletic and Football Club Limited”.

Mr Bates’ lawyers sent a “detailed explanation as to why the allegations were false” after the article’s release to Mr Rubython, who published “an edited version of the letter”.

Mr Rubython, who represented himself in the claim, argued Mr Bates “already had such a bad reputation that it was incapable of sustaining any serious harm as a result of the publication of the article”.

On Friday, Judge Eardley ruled Mr Bates had been defamed and awarded him £150,000 in damages, describing the case as “serious libel”.

In a 40-page ruling, he said: “There is a strong whiff of revenge, although the reader is never told why the writer might bear a grudge, and the assertion, mistaken of course, that the claimant could not sue for libel may have led some readers to wonder whether the writer had felt free to throw as much mud as he could find, with or without a proper factual basis.

“The allegation of murdering rivals in the concrete business appears to be based on little more than the assertion that this is what everyone did at the time, which would strike some readers as an extraordinarily flimsy basis for such a serious allegation.”

A three-day hearing in October heard Mr Rubython was “enraged” after reading an interview with Mr Bates in the Mail On Sunday that painted a “fairly positive picture” of the businessman.

The judge said that in the article Mr Rubython published, he wrote that at the time Mr Bates had his first business success “it was necessary to have your business rivals killed” and “almost certainly Bates has had his business rivals disposed of in the past”.

In his ruling, the judge said Mr Rubython “knew his article would contain serious allegations but he did not approach the claimant for comment while he was preparing it”, and found that it was read by “around 9,000 people in England and Wales”.

In awarding Mr Bates damages, Judge Eardley also granted an injunction that prevented Mr Rubython and his magazine from publishing the same or similar allegations.

In a statement, Mr Bates said: “I am very pleased with the decision of the court today.

“This is an article that should never have been published, and the judgment makes that clear.”