Ewing (Terence Patrick) v News International Ltd & others
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Mr Justice Coulson |
| Judgment Date | 22 July 2008 |
| Neutral Citation | [2008] EWHC 1390 (QB) |
| Docket Number | Case No: IHQ/08/0069 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
| Date | 22 July 2008 |
[2008] EWHC 1390 (QB)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
Mr Justice Coulson
In the Matter of an Application Under Section 42(3) of the Supreme Court Act 1981
Case No: IHQ/08/0069
IHQ/08/0150
The Claimant in Person
Ms Katrin Evans (instructed by Reynolds Porter Chamberlain LLP) for the First and Second Proposed Defendants
Mr Manuel Barca (instructed by Foot Anstey) for the Third and Fourth Proposed Defendants
Hearing Date: 19 June 2008
Approved Judgment
I direct that pursuant to CPR PD 39A para 6.1 no official shorthand note shall be taken of this Judgment and that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic.
The Honourable
A. INTRODUCTION
The claimant is a vexatious litigant within the meaning of section 42 of the Supreme Court Act 1981. He therefore requires leave under section 42(3) to institute civil proceedings. The claimant now seeks such leave to bring claims against two sets of defendants: the first and second proposed defendants, News International Limited and Times Newspapers Limited (whom I shall refer to collectively as 'the Times defendants'); and the third and fourth proposed defendants, Northcliffe Media Limited and North Somerset News and Media Limited (whom I shall refer to collectively as 'the Somerset defendants'). The proposed proceedings concern articles published by The Sunday Times on 11 February 2007 (and subsequently on the Times website), and by the Weston and Worle News, on 15 February 2007. The claimant alleges that the articles in question are defamatory. He also seeks to make claims for a whole raft of other matters ancillary to those articles, including claims for harassment, breach of confidentiality, breach of privacy and the like. His applications for leave under section 42(3) of the 1981 Act are opposed by the proposed defendants.
I set out in Section B below some of the relevant background. I set out in Section C a summary of the particular articles about which the claimant now complains. At Section D, I deal with some of the important events following their publication in 2007, and leading up to the making of these applications. At Section E I identify the particular issues that have arisen between the parties on these applications. Then, at SectionsF-I of this Judgment, I set out my analysis and resolution of those issues. There is a short summary of my conclusions at Section J below.
B. BACKGROUND
The claimant's first brush with the law came in 1981, when he was convicted of 24 counts of theft, forgery of valuable securities and other documents. He was sentenced to 7 years imprisonment. In 1983 the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction on three of the 24 counts, and upheld it on the remaining 21. The claimant is, therefore, a convicted fraudster (a description of him used in the papers and during oral argument). Of course, those convictions are now some 27 years old, and therefore some allowance must be made in the claimant's favour for the lengthy passage of time during which no further criminal convictions have been recorded against him.
The claimant was made the subject of a Civil Proceedings Order, as defined in section 42(1)(a) of the Supreme Court Act 1981, at the conclusion of a hearing in the Divisional Court on 21 December 1989. The order was dated 12 February 1990. In his judgment, Rose J (as he then was) listed the numerous vexatious claims pursued by the claimant up to that point. There were a total of 37, of which 25 were relied on and dealt with by the court.
The extracts from some of the claimant's letters in those cases, summarised in the judgment of Rose J, make dispiriting reading. In a claim for harassment and unlawful eviction made against his landlord, Mrs Vasquez, the claimant said to her solicitors:
“I will not in any event comply with any order for payment or taxation order…. I shall knowingly and wilfully be defaulting on all debts owed to your trash wet back clients and the trash Law Society.”
In similar vein, in taxation proceedings following yet another unlawful and vexatious dispute, the claimant wrote to the Treasury Solicitor to say;
“It is my policy on taxation to make the proceedings deliberately as expensive and convoluted for the opposition as I can possibly make them with every conceivable objection and point being taken, no matter how minor…I can also assure you that I intend to make the proceedings in the Westminster County Court as embarrassing as I possibly can for your client and your department”.
Unhappily, the making of the order under section 42 of the 1981 Act seems to have had little, if any, impact on the claimant and his veracious appetite for civil litigation. There is evidence before me of at least 19 separate applications made by the claimant, following the court order in December 1989, in which he has sought permission to bring claims. The claimant himself admits to making 22 applications in 17 separate actions. There is therefore considerable force in Ms Evans' submission that, since the making of the Civil Proceedings Order, the claimant has continued to indulge in vexatious litigation, but under the more restricted umbrella of section 42. The vast majority of these applications were unsuccessful. They were variously described by the court as “quite unarguable on the merits” ( Ex Parte Ewing [1991] 1 WLR, 388); “unarguable” ( R v Office of Deputy Prime Minister and Others ex parte Ewing and Hammerton (unreported 8 April 05, QBD Admin Court); “no arguable basis for challenge” (see Rv Legal Services Ombudsman and another, unreported, 23 February 1998, QBD Crown Office List); “none of the claimant's proposed challenges are even arguably sustainable” (see Ewing v Security Service, unreported, 20 December 2002, a decision of Davis J.)
In view of the matters which I have to decide in this case, it should also be noted that a number of these applications failed because of delays on the part of the claimant himself. In R v Office of Deputy Prime Minister, referred to above, Ouseley J said that the delay on the part of the claimant was unjustified and that, in consequence, no extension of time was appropriate. Thus the challenge that the claimant wished to make in that case was untenable. In the Court of Appeal hearing concerned with permission to appeal only, Brooke LJ said, in the context of judicial review;
“On the hearing of the substantive appeal, this court may wish to consider the status of vexatious litigants in relation to judicial review proceedings because they must be brought promptly, at all events within 3 months. If leave is required by a vexatious litigant, application for leave must be made well within that time.”
It should be noted that, on the substantive appeal in that case, reported at [2006] 1 WLR 260, the claimant, and his associate Mr Hammerton (of whom more later), failed to demonstrate that they had anything other than a tenuous connection with the proposed development of a large site in Weston-super-Mare, and had no standing to challenge the decision to allow its development. This failed litigation was important to the applications before me, for a number of reasons which will become apparent below.
Also relevant to the general question of delays on the part of the claimant, in R v Legal Services Ombudsman, also referred to above, Richards J (as he then was) said that an application for leave had to be made promptly and that Mr Ewing was familiar with the process of litigation and therefore knew the requirements. He said that there had been “a want of promptness” which led to the judge's refusal of the application for judicial review.
It would be both unnecessary and tedious to set out in any greater detail the unhappy and largely futile nature of the claimant's serial litigation between 1989 and the present day. Suffice to say that it has always been persistent and sometimes even absurd: one claim, involving the London Borough of Islington (see R v London Borough of Islington [1998] EWHC Admin 948) was concerned with a dispute that had already generated two previous sets of proceedings, relating to £92 and costs.
Furthermore, there is clear evidence that, in accordance with his stated policy (see paragraph 5 above) the claimant does not pay the costs that he is ordered to pay when his applications and claims prove unsuccessful. There is unchallenged evidence that, in the dispute about the development of a site in Weston-super-Mare, the Royal British Legion (who were one of the proposed developers) obtained a costs order in their favour against the claimant in the sum of £10,430. That sum remains unpaid. In the present proceedings, the claimant was asked to confirm in writing that all the outstanding costs that he had been ordered to pay over the years had indeed been paid. The defendants' counsel noted that he had not replied to that request. I find as a fact that the claimant is a serial litigator who does not pay the costs of those who successfully defeat his claims.
A particular field of activity in which the claimant has engaged in recent years has been in relation to planning applications. The dispute relating to the development in Weston-super-Mare is just one example of this: there is evidence before me of at least 17 planning applications in which the claimant, usually but not always under the name of Euston Trust, has objected to various planning applications. Euston Trust is not a company but the name of an unincorporated association which appears on letters sent out by the claimant and his former associate, Mr Hammerton. There appears...
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