An Uzbek businessman has secured £105,000 in damages and £117,663.38 in legal costs after prevailing in a defamation lawsuit against a UK-based publishing network, marking the largest publicly reported payout in a so-called "pink slime" case to date.

Ovik Mkrtchyan, represented by law firm Carter-Ruck — one of the UK's best-known specialist defamation firms — sued British publisher 2Trom and its director Viktor Tokarev over an article published in October 2024 on the London Post website. The article accused Mkrtchyan of leading an Uzbek corruption network, embezzling state funds, laundering money, and exploiting the acquisition of Asia Alliance Bank to seize state assets.

A City AM investigation into 2Trom was submitted as evidence during the High Court proceedings. The investigation had previously documented a pattern of articles published across 2Trom's network of websites targeting international businessmen, many of them based in former Soviet states. The term "pink slime" originated in the United States to describe politically motivated outlets that mimic local news brands; in the UK, it has come to encompass any outlet that presents itself as a legitimate news organization but disseminates content designed for propaganda or misinformation purposes.

Mr Justice Fordham ruled that the London Post article — which remains accessible online — had caused serious harm to Mkrtchyan's reputation, the statutory threshold required to succeed under the UK's Defamation Act 2013, and had directly contributed to his companies and a family member losing their banking services.

2Trom did not contest the defamation claim, resulting in a default judgment entered by the court. The publisher also failed to defend a separate 2025 copyright case brought by a photographer over unauthorized use of his images.

The mechanics of pink slime journalism

As detailed in City AM's investigation, pink slime journalism is not primarily intended to reach mass audiences. Instead, it serves as a tool to manipulate algorithms used by banking compliance firms and to distort AI-generated summaries on search engines — a particularly damaging tactic as major financial institutions increasingly rely on automated screening databases to assess client risk.

Thomas Rudkin, a partner at Farrer & Co, explained: "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."

"Worse still, these actions are relatively easy to execute and cheap to deploy," Rudkin continued. "The disinformation can take many different forms, including outlandish allegations of criminality, articles attributing quotes to people who do not exist and articles authored by nameless 'reporters'. There is often evidence of SEO techniques or content being generated by AI in the fake material."

Rudkin outlined several avenues available to victims of such campaigns, though he noted that none are straightforward. Targets of disinformation can request removal directly from the publishing websites, petition Google to delist the offending articles, ask chatbot platforms such as ChatGPT to exclude the websites from their training data and outputs, or request that due-diligence databases like World-Check remove infringing content from their platforms.

"Litigation — as in the Mkrtchyan and London Post case — is a tool that some individuals or organisations might also choose," Rudkin added. "This comes with the benefit of a public court judgment if successful."