There was an important victory for press freedom and for unbiassed financial journalism at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) last week.
Eight years after several British newspapers received leaked information about Interbrew’s planned bid for South African Breweries (SAB) from an anonymous third party, they have won the judicial battle for the right to protect their sources.
Paul Murphy, the former Guardian financial editor who now edits FT Alphaville, has written a good piece on the episode. The UK courts, Interbrew (now AB Inbev), Reuters and the Financial Services Authority come out of this saga with their reputations seriously tarnished.
As Pail Murphy writes: “In a series of bizarre rulings, the British courts basically agreed with everything Interbrew claimed, effectively deciding that one (foreign) company’s need to fix its own internal security outweighed the need to protect the most basic principles of press freedom in Britain.
“At which point the whole thing turned in to a pantomime.
“Reuters, shamefully, decided to comply with the order – handing over the docs to Interbrew. The organisation is directly regulated by the FSA and it felt it had no freedom to evade the regulator, which was by now conducting a fruitless insider dealing investigation.”
It speaks volumes about the shabby state of our justice system, and the need for Briain to remain in the ECHR, that the newspapers had to go to Europe to secure this victory
To read Paul Murphy’s account of the affair click here To read the Guardian’s news piece on the saga click here
A longer version of this blog post was published by Qfinance on 21 December 2009