Uzbek businessman wins record £105,000 payout in UK 'pink slime' defamation case

An Uzbek businessman has secured the largest publicly reported damages award in a British pink slime defamation case, after the High Court ordered a UK publishing network to pay £105,000 in damages and £117,663.38 in legal costs.

Ovik Mkrtchyan, represented by Carter-Ruck, sued 2Trom and its director Viktor Tokarev over an article published on the London Post website in October 2024. The piece accused him of leading a corruption network in Uzbekistan, embezzling state funds, laundering money and using the purchase of Asia Alliance Bank to seize state assets. Mr Justice Fordham accepted the allegations had seriously damaged Mkrtchyan's reputation and contributed to his companies and a family member losing banking services.

Default judgment after publisher fails to engage

2Trom did not contest the claim, resulting in a default judgment. The company also failed to defend a separate 2025 copyright action brought by a photographer over unauthorised use of his images. A City AM investigation into 2Trom's network of sites, which target business figures across the former Soviet states, was submitted as evidence in the High Court hearing.

Cheap, scalable disinformation

The case illustrates how coordinated smear campaigns have moved beyond state actors. According to Thomas Rudkin, a partner at Farrer & Co, malicious actors can now deploy fictitious content on paid-for websites with no editorial oversight, often using SEO tricks and AI-generated text to ensure the material surfaces in the automated screening tools that financial institutions rely on.

"Coordinated disinformation and smear campaigns are no longer simply the domain of state actors. They are increasingly deployed by malicious actors, the classic MO is to have fictitious content published on paid websites with no editorial scrutiny."

Limited remedies for victims

Rudkin outlines several routes for those targeted: direct takedown requests to the publisher, asking Google to delist the URL, petitioning chatbot operators such as ChatGPT to exclude the source, and pressing due-diligence databases like World-Check to remove the entries. Litigation, while costly, yields a public court judgment that can be used to force compliance from platforms and data providers.

The default judgment against 2Trom demonstrates that courts are willing to treat algorithmically amplified libel as seriously as traditional publication, setting a precedent for future claims against similar networks.