Sacha Lord is threatening to sue us. Give us a hand

'Our client is entitled to seek substantial damages for the injury to his reputation, in vindication of his good name'.

Dear Millers — last Wednesday, I was sitting in a very grand room in London, trying to estimate the chances of The Mill getting sued by Sacha Lord.

I had just come off stage at the Truthtellers, an investigative journalism summit organised by the legendary Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown. The panel I was involved in had been a thrill, the highlight of which was discovering that the Wall Street Journal’s editor Emma Tucker is an admiring Miller. "I think it's a very, very clever thing that they have done,” Tucker told a room of journalism VIPs. As you can imagine, I was on a high.

Straight after the panel ended, I had a decision to make. We had given Sacha Lord’s representatives until 3pm to answer our questions about why his company Primary Events Solutions had misrepresented itself to the Arts Council at the height of the pandemic on the way to obtaining more than £400,000 of public money. Did he stand by the funding application’s description of the company as “the backbone of the national creative events sector”? Former staff members had told us it was purely a security company — could he supply any evidence or contacts that would prove our sources wrong?

Conference staff showed me to a high-ceilinged room on the top floor of the Royal Institute of British Architects, where the summit was taking place, and I sat down to work. At the other end of the long board table was a senior BBC executive, both of us hoping that Brown wouldn’t find us in here hunched over our laptops, rudely skipping the talks about war reporting and AI downstairs.

The Mill’s staff writer Jack Dulhanty, who had been working on the story with me, was sending me updates via email. We had a few hours to read the responses from Lord, the Arts Council and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and make final edits to the piece.

But there was something strange about the email we got from Lord’s spokesperson: it barely answered any of our questions. Nowhere did it say that the company stood by the descriptions in the Arts Council application or offer any evidence that the company did more than security when it made the application in January 2021. Nor did Lord explain why he was in the process of winding up the company despite owing almost £100,000 to the government or – crucially – tell us how the business spent its huge grant.

I called Natalie, a brilliant solicitor we keep on retainer to help in moments like these. Like me, she felt that Lord’s response strengthened our hand. The story was risky — we were accusing a wealthy and powerful man of lying to get public money and we had quotes from his former business partner calling the funding application fraudulent. But if Lord was declining the opportunity to knock down the story, it suggested our reporting was solid. I told Jack to go ahead with his final fact-checks and went downstairs for drinks.

The story, which we published the next day, has been a hit. Together with the follow-up post we published on Saturday, it’s been read more than 75,000 times and shared hundreds of times on social media. It has been the top conversation on Manchester’s Reddit forum for days.

The lawsuit

How do you know when a wealthy Mancunian is in trouble? Because the legal letter comes from London. Fast forward to 5.04pm on Friday, and an expensive law firm in the capital sent me a letter threatening to sue The Mill. Our story was defamatory, the letter said, and “factually wrong”.

The lawyers insisted that Primary Events was, in fact, “involved in providing event management including bar staff, events supervisors, event managers, marketing, artist liaison and ticketing” when the Arts Council application went in.

Lord “requires that you permanently remove the aforementioned Publications from your website, from Twitter and from any other place online within your control by no later than 4pm on Tuesday 21 May 2024.” In addition, the lawyers demanded:

1. “Publication of a suitable public correction and apology, in terms to be approved by us.

2. An agreement not to republish these allegations again in future.

3. Payment of our legal costs to date.”

Now for the threat: “should you refuse to comply with these reasonable requests, then our client reserves his right to issue proceedings against you without further notice in the King’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice in which he will seek substantial damages, injunctive relief and costs.”

Unfortunately for us, UK libel laws are very favourable to claimants and unfavourable to publishers. Wealthy individuals can tie up media companies in protracted and expensive defamation lawsuits (you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of pounds, minimum, if it goes to court), even if their case is weak. Many publishers, particularly smaller ones, fold when they get a letter like this one.

But let me explain why we are not folding — and why I need your help while we stick to our guns.

The Arts Council problem

My thinking is as follows. We published a story showing Lord’s company grossly misled the Arts Council to get £401,928 of public money. We revealed that the company only changed its name from Primary Security to Primary Events Solutions after the government had announced its £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund for the arts sector, and we quoted three former members of staff, all of whom said the company was a security company and that the application was therefore full of fabrications.

Lord says that we are wrong. He is asking us to believe that between the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and when the application was made in January 2021, the company underwent an extraordinary transformation. Despite the lockdowns meaning that very few events took place during this period and that its staff were on furlough, the application suggests Primary had become “the backbone of the national creative events sector”, supplying “event coordinators, managers, production managers, assistants, technicians, sound engineers, lighting engineers, AV, bar staff, security staff, merchandise, cleaners and more for a huge number of the most respected and loved cultural events in the UK”.

Lord says the Arts Council is on his side. His lawyers point out that the body that distributes culture funding approved the original application and then found no wrongdoing when it investigated Primary Events after Mark Turnbull made his complaint in late 2022. Although this was absent from their statement, a spokesperson for Arts Council England told us that the investigation found no public money was misused, while admitting that it sought no receipts or invoices from Primary Events.

And then we have the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), which seems to be taking Lord’s side too. Despite six separate requests from The Mill last week, the GMCA has declined to say that it is investigating the allegations against Lord. We can therefore assume they are not investigating. In their only on-the-record statement, the GMCA fell back on the Arts Council, telling us: “Any questions related to the content of the application should be directed to the applicants and any on the awarding process to Arts Council England.”

The Arts Council’s failure to spot the misleading claims in Primary’s application leaves us more legally exposed, but does it undermine our story? I don’t think so. Our job as journalists is not to assume that public bodies are doing their job competently and honestly, and to accept their answers as gospel — quite the opposite. It’s perfectly possible that the Arts Council has screwed up here, and that instead of admitting their mistake, they are trying to cover it up. Other explanations are available, of course, but without them explaining why they thought the application was legitimate, we don’t know.

A community fact-check

Someone has to be wrong here: either we are wrong and we’ve made a mistake with our story. Or if we’re right, Lord and the Arts Council are wrong and the GMCA has made a serious error of judgement by siding with its advisor rather than investigating him.

So here’s how I suggest we resolve this. Lord’s lawyers have demanded we take down the story by 4pm tomorrow and issue an apology. So far, they have provided no evidence that disproves the story. But if they produce that evidence, I will take the story down. Not only that, I will make a big deal of it, and I will apologise publicly for getting it wrong. Lord’s spokesperson actually suggested that the unredacted version of the funding application includes exonerating information that puts a different spin on things. We immediately asked them to send the full version, and I’d like to repeat that invitation now. 

In the meantime, we will press on with our reporting. But now we’ll do it on steroids. If Arts Council England (which has a large office in Manchester, by the way) and the GMCA can’t be bothered to do a proper investigation, we will do their job for them. And we will do it together with you. We don’t have anything like the staff or resources of the Arts Council or the GMCA, but we do have the most engaged readership in British journalism, so we may as well use it. There are 45,000 Millers on this mailing list, some of whom are trained as journalists, researchers, lawyers and police officers, and others of whom we know from past stories are extremely good online sleuths.

Our story last week focused on some of the key misleading details in the document, but there are dozens more claims we haven’t been able to check. Now that we’re being threatened with a lawsuit, we need to go through every single line. 

So here’s the application document in full — we’ve taken the unusual step of publishing it on our website. Please dive in.

You will notice it includes lots of boasts that we didn’t mention in our story last week, including:

• “Across our events in the UK we estimate we bring approx £182.6million into the national economy (based on data from MCC, other LAs and Live Nation).”

• “We have a history of providing a platform for the strongest emerging talent across genres & have supported hundreds of artists over the years. Examples of those that have gone on to international success inc. Florence & the Machine, Calvin Harris, Giggs & Stormzy.”

• “We produce, manage & staff significant cultural events across the UK & abroad. This includes large-scale festivals across regions of the UK e.g. Parklife, Kendal Calling, Jodrell Bank Live, Festival No. 6, Warehouse Project, Lovebox & Wilderness; & internationally e.g. Lost & Found, Hideout & BPM.”

These feel like claims that might relate to Lord’s other businesses like Parklife and Warehouse Project, but are they true of Primary Events? You will note that the form includes an undertaking that it is “not on behalf of a group or other companies” and that: “This funding is purely for transitioning Primary Events to a position of financial viability and sustainability.”

We should afford Lord the assumption that everything in the document is true unless we can find solid evidence otherwise, but let’s check every detail. Can anyone find a source for that £182.6m claim and see if it relates to Primary? Does anyone have friends who work at Jodrell Bank Live or Lovebox or any of the other events mentioned who might be able to share emails or invoices that could clear up what services were provided to those events?

Here’s how the Millers’ community fact-check will work. 

1. I’ve diverted three of our reporters from their other stories to work on this investigation full-time this week, including two from our sister publications in Sheffield and Liverpool.

2. Please send any tips, documents or leads to [email protected]. The moment you do, everyone working on this story will be notified and we will update our fact-checking document, which lists every claim in the application with reporting notes beside it.

3. Once we have gathered evidence about the truth or untruth of a claim in the document, we will go to Lord’s lawyers to give them a chance to respond. Then we will post what we have found on social media, as well as updating the GMCA and the Arts Council. 

By 4pm tomorrow, the deadline set by Lord’s lawyers, we should have a very good idea of who is in the right here and who has misjudged things. There’s nothing like a mass exercise in public transparency to sort things out. 

A final thought

The reason I want to do this is because I think there is something important at stake here, something more profound than the misuse £401,928 of public money, though that is serious in itself.

The most high-profile advisor to the mayor of Greater Manchester — a man who was handpicked by Andy Burnham and is known to be a close friend — has been accused of serious wrongdoing. In response, the GMCA — the local authority that is funded by all of us and is supposed to represent all of us — has refused to act, passing the buck to another arm of the state.

As we pointed out on Saturday, there are major questions about scrutiny of regional mayors, particularly in a place like Greater Manchester where one party is so dominant. Yes, there are scrutiny committees, but they are dominated by Labour councillors, many of whom need to keep Burnham on side for when they need help campaigning in their council seat or with their future career. I’ve rarely seen Burnham or a GMCA official being given a really hard time by a scrutiny committee. 

And so the job of scrutinising power mostly falls to the local media. As we’ve reported, the MEN was sent this story in late 2022 and didn’t even reply when the documents were shared with them. So for now, let’s not rely on anyone else to hold the GMCA and its advisors to account. Let’s just do it ourselves. 

The Arts Council, a massively influential public body that distributes billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, has seemingly been duped by a company that lied repeatedly in its application for funding, and now is refusing to tell us how it made the decision not to recoup the money. In the application itself, the Arts Council says that: “If we identify or suspect fraudulent activity we will report this to the police and take appropriate action." Did they not suspect it here?

Last week’s Truthtellers summit in London was held in honour of the late Sir Harry Evans, a man who rose from humble roots in Manchester, via a local newspaper in Ashton, to become the greatest British newspaper editor of the twentieth century at the Sunday Times. He exposed the Thalidomide scandal and many more. 

I was planning to publish a long read about Evans and his legacy this past weekend, for which I spoke to his wife Tina Brown and others who knew him, but that piece will have to wait. Evans was a tenacious editor who was also supremely calm under fire. He didn’t often back down when companies stonewalled him or governments threatened him with injunctions. 

If you’re not yet a member of The Mill, this would be a particularly good time to join up and support our team. Stories like this come with big extra costs and we need your backing to do them. It's only because of those who think Greater Manchester needs this kind of journalism, and are willing to pay for it, that we've been able to publish this story. That means we answer to you, the people of the city, not the powers that be.

Please also share this editor’s note using the button below, so that it spreads far and wide. We need people who work at all these festivals and events to get in touch in the next few days, so the more people who see this the better.

And finally, if you have a spare hour today, take a look at the document and see if you can pitch in. We may not be publishing a piece about Evans this week, but let’s do some journalism that is worthy of him. And let’s do it together.