Sometimes it’s worth the risk

Firstly, to the many of you who have joined our e-mail list this week — it’s great to have you.

The tip off originally came from a WhatsApp group called Medic Mums. It’s a sign of how many medical mums I know (despite being neither a medic nor a mum myself) that three members of the group separately got in touch. A member of the group had said they'd “received a threatening letter from a certain Andrew Milne”, a man who had acquired the freehold on her home.

Odd, I thought. Then things started to get odder. I was introduced to another resident who told me that he too had heard from Milne — and not only him, but a lot of his neighbours as well.

I started to nose around on the Land Registry a bit. You have to pay £7 every time you want to download a property title, but I thought, well: this seems pretty significant. Soon I was delving through auction records trying to work out just which properties had been acquired by Milne. The registry is slow to update, so Mollie, Dan and I began knocking on doors. Have you heard from an Andrew Milne? Those answering either looked blank — or haunted.

A bit of detective work, a convoluted spreadsheet and many £7 payments later, we thought we had a good sense of the scale of it. It was big — hundreds of properties involved. The next step was to start getting more information about Milne’s approach. Mollie and Dan hammered on doors in the driving rain. More people showed us their letters. We struggled to believe the content, as well as the tone that many have described as “threatening”. And when we saw the documents that Milne had apparently mocked up in the style of high court papers, we were stunned. We pulled a draft together and got ready to publish.

Then we were stopped in our tracks. As Dan wrote about last week, we received communications from Milne threatening legal action.

Most people who threaten us with legal action over one of our stories do so with a degree of subtlety. “My client may be forced to seek legal recourse in defamation,” their lawyer might say. Milne, however, was unusually blunt. 

“We will definitely bring proceedings for Defamation and Malicious Falsehood if you publish such complete and malicious lies,” he wrote, via his own law firm.

It’s easy with hindsight to know what the right thing to do is. But at that time it was pretty daunting. Like many of the homeowners, we’d done our research — we knew Milne had frequently taken court action. Even if there was no real case to answer, the cost of defending ourselves from a defamation action could easily run to six figures.

We looked at the problem from every which way. But we just couldn’t see a world in which we didn’t publish. We had all sat with people in tears who described to us the experience of receiving the letters and dealing with Milne. Many felt angry, or deeply ashamed for giving him their money. 

“It broke my heart, that was my savings towards a new car,” one woman who paid Milne tens of thousands of pounds told us. “He has just wiped me out.”

They didn’t want to be named — but they did want their stories to be known. If we didn’t publish, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs. It needed someone to expose Milne’s behaviour for those who were living in fear to have some hope again.

But we knew we needed to get absolutely ready. We spoke to more homeowners and solicitors, making sure we were completely confident about our facts. We got lawyers of our own in to check and double check the draft. We asked Milne more questions, so he couldn’t say later that he didn’t have a chance to respond. (He came back with lengthy dialogues about leaseholds — and more threats.)

Finally, on Thursday we were all ready to go. But I still felt slightly sick as my computer mouse hovered over the publish button. Here goes, I thought.

The response that followed quickly confirmed that we had done the right thing. There were the experts, like the high profile tax lawyer Dan Neidle, telling his hundreds of thousands of social media followers how out of order Milne’s behaviour was. There were the senior investigative reporters at national titles sharing our work. And, most importantly, there were the many ordinary people from all walks of life who didn't need legal or journalistic training to see that there was something very wrong here.

We have a website that tracks website views for each day. Here is the profile of the year to date. It’s fair to say there’s been strong public interest.

But this story also showed what The Tribune can do when it has people’s support. A couple of months ago we felt we had enough members to take on another reporter, Mollie Simpson. She played a huge part in this piece, with her legendary ability to empathise and connect with people. And having an all round bigger team means we can take on much more complex stories and deeper investigations.

There was one other debate we had before publishing: whether we should put a paywall on the story. After so much time, cost, and risk, it was tempting to try to make some of that huge outlay back, and arguably only fair — after all, this journalism is anything but free to produce. We knew that dozens, maybe hundreds, of people would become subscribers to find out which properties Milne had bought and how they could respond if he sent letters to them. It would have been our biggest membership bounce of the year. 

We chose not to take that path. People who had received letters from Milne were under financial pressure already — we didn’t want to add to it. We’re here to serve this city, and in this case making the information widely available felt like the right call.

Who knows what will happen next. There is every chance that Milne will follow through with his threat of suing us for defamation at the high court, in which case we will defend our story robustly, with the help of our brilliant lawyers. We also plan to report more on this story, so that we can reveal the true extent of Milne’s activities. 

Bowing down to threats isn’t in The Tribune’s DNA, and doing so would mean giving up on our journalistic mission. We can only take that approach because we have the backing of our paying members, whose subscriptions fund all of our investigative work and give us the confidence that we can take on all comers.

Thanks for reading and supporting The Tribune, and have a lovely rest of your Sunday. 

Daniel