Karan Bagga v Stichting Chemical Distribution Institute

Mr Karan Bagga, a marine surveyor who runs his business through a Singapore company, held an accreditation as an inspector under the vessel inspection scheme run by Stichting Chemical Distribution Institute (CDI), a non-profit foundation incorporated in the Netherlands and operating from the UK. Ship operators had several times asked CDI to nominate a different inspector because of his proposed fees. After a ship manager complained on 27 October 2016 about his fees and attitude, CDI's general manager suspended his accreditation, investigated, and referred the matter to CDI's executive board, which interviewed him on 26 January 2017 and revoked the accreditation.

Mr Bagga sued CDI in England over the suspension and revocation; that action settled. Using documents disclosed there, he brought two Singapore suits, consolidated as Suit No 30 of 2022, for defamation and malicious falsehood over eight statements. These were emails and minutes sent to CDI's board, executive board and accreditation committee, an email to the complaining ship manager, and minutes circulated to all CDI inspectors that described an unnamed inspector's pricing abuse. He said the statements meant, among other things, that his fees were excessive, that he had ignored warnings and that his conduct damaged CDI. CDI denied defamation and relied on justification and qualified privilege.

1. Whether statements circulated only to CDI's internal bodies were published to third parties.
2. Whether the two statements sent to all inspectors, which did not name him, referred to Mr Bagga.
3. Whether the statements were defamatory, and whether justification or qualified privilege applied.
4. Whether CDI published the statements with malice, defeating privilege and supporting malicious falsehood.

Five statements went only to CDI's board, executive board or accreditation committee. The court held that these were internal organs of CDI, so CDI had in effect published the statements to itself and there was no publication to a third party. That their members used email addresses at their own chemical companies was too formalistic a point. The two statements sent to all inspectors named no one, and Mr Bagga gave no evidence that readers knew his accreditation had been revoked or would notice his name missing from CDI's website, so they did not refer to him. The email to the ship manager said only that the board had expressed concern about his fees and was not defamatory.

For completeness the court considered the defences. Justification succeeded only in part. CDI proved that it had warned him about pricing on several occasions and that the revocation decision was unanimous. It did not prove that his fees were in fact excessive: it set no benchmark, gave no definition of excessive, relied on a small sample, and the complaints showed only that operators and CDI thought the fees too high. Nor did it justify the suggestion that he posed a risk to CDI's other schemes. Qualified privilege, however, applied to all the statements, as each recipient had a legitimate interest in receiving them.

On malice, the court found that CDI honestly believed the statements. A query about his nationality followed his own visa difficulty, a small overstatement of complaint numbers did not suggest malice, and his claims of improper motive were conjecture. With no malice, the malicious falsehood claim, which was not pleaded in any event, also failed. The court added that Mr Bagga appeared to be relitigating the settled English contract claim.

The High Court dismissed Mr Bagga's claims in defamation and malicious falsehood. Costs were to follow the event, with the amount to be decided after submissions.