HarperCollins apologizes to Russian billionaire over book claiming Putin ordered Chelsea soccer team purchase

The publisher also acknowledged that the claim in the book was made on the basis of statements made by two unidentified individuals and Sergei Pugachev, a financier who used to be in Putin’s inner circle but now lives in exile.

In a statement, HarperCollins — a division of the Murdoch-family-controlled News Corp — and Belton apologized for “aspects of the book [that] were not as clear as they would have liked them to have been.” Belton separately said that the claim on the Chelsea purchase “has not been admitted to be false” and new editions would make “clear to all how minor any amendments are.”

A spokesperson for Abramovich, who served as a Russian Far East governor in the early 2000s, said in a statement that the 55-year-old billionaire was “pleased” to have received the apology and welcomes changes made to some 1,700 words in Belton’s book.

“Putin’s People” has received widespread acclaim — and stirred controversy — since its release. In a review, The Washington Post called it “an outstanding account of Putin’s Russia,” in which Belton “builds a strong case against Putin’s corruption and the bald hypocrisy of his propaganda.” Belton, the former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times of London, this year won a prize named after a Russian anti-corruption lawyer who was beaten and died mysteriously in prison.

The book has also drawn lawsuits from three other Russian billionaires and Rosneft, a Russian state-controlled energy company. A British judge ruled last month that three of the four passages Rosneft contested were not defamatory.

The same judge, Amanda Tipples, said Belton’s claim on Abramovich’s Chelsea purchase had defamatory meaning because readers could be left with the impression that it was a tool to expand Russian influence in Britain, according to Reuters. The ruling did not include judgment on whether the claim was true.

Under English law, a claim can be found defamatory if it diminishes a subject’s reputation within their community, said Jelena Gligorijevic, a media law expert at the Australian National University. The burden to prove that such a claim is factual then falls on the defendant, she said.

Belton’s book, which said late Russian tycoon Boris ​​Berezovsky was an owner of Sibneft, a major oil producer, will also be amended to indicate that a British court had found the claim to be untrue. HarperCollins said it would make a charitable donation due to the “error” but has not been asked to offer monetary compensation for other contested passages.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, London became a hub for wealthy members of the Russian diaspora. Relations between Russia and Britain have cooled significantly in recent years, however, particularly after a Cold War nerve agent was used to poison a former double-agent and his daughter in southern England in 2018.

Critics have accused Russian oligarchs of “libel tourism,” or taking advantage of Britain’s relatively strict speech and publication laws, to silence unfriendly reporting. The country’s Parliament in 2013 clamped down on potential abuses of such laws, two years after the United States passed legislation to shield U.S.-based writers from rulings in legal systems that have less rigorous free speech protections.

Since Abramovich’s purchase, Chelsea, the current European soccer champion, has transitioned from being a relative also-ran to one of Britain’s glitzier and more successful sports teams.

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