The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich settled his libel claim against journalist Catherine Belton over her best-selling book Putin's People after an agreement was reached late on Tuesday.
The text will recognize that the allegation of Abramovich bought Chelsea football club at the Russian president's behest is not a statement of fact. It will include additional denials from the club's oligarch spokesman and the club.
It will correct a claim that the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky co-owned Russian oil company Sibneft with Abramovich. Abramovich won the amendment after a 2011 high court battle between the two men. In recognition of this error, HarperCollins has agreed to make a donation to charity.
Abramovich has been sued over a number of claims, including that he bought Chelsea on Vladimir Putin's orders. He was one of three Russian tycoons who started libel proceedings against Belton and HarperCollins, along with Russian state oil company Rosneft.
The other defendants settled or withdrew their claims. Abramovich ended up with a case after HarperCollins said on Wednesday that some information regarding the oligarch was inaccurate. It agreed to make revisions to the book, widely acclaimed as the definitive work on the Putin era.
HarperCollins praised the overnight settlement as a fair deal. There are no damages paid to Abramovich himself. Both sides will pay their own costs. The legal bill was likely to have exceeded 10 m had the libel trial gone ahead in the high court next year, it is understood.
The publisher said that while the book always included a denial that Mr Abramovich was acting under anyone's direction when he purchased Chelsea, the new edition will include a more detailed explanation of Mr Abramovich's motivations for buying the club.
HarperCollins has made clear in the book that there is no evidence beyond the statements of the individuals themselves that support claims to the author by former Kremlin insider Sergei Pugachev and two other unnamed individuals about the purchase of Chelsea Football Club. HarperCollins acknowledged that a high court judge described Berezovsky as an inherently unreliable witness. He added: HarperCollins and the author apologised for not being as clear as they would have liked to have been and are happy to have clarified the text. The agreement is seen as a victory for Belton, who has come under unprecedented legal assault from billionaires with Kremlin ties, despite the revisions. Abramovich served eight years as governor of Chukotka, a region in Russia's far east. He has denied being under the Russian government's control.
She said last year she had been affected by a war of attrition in which she had been bombarded with lawsuits from four Russian billionaires and Rosneft.
Belton said that although the claimants denied it was coordinated, it has appeared to me similar to the Kremlin's multi-pronged campaign against Ukraine in which it has tried to exhaust the west into making security concessions over Nato's expansion. She continued: HarperCollins has staunchly defended the book. I could not have wished for a better publisher who was more committed to public interest journalism. Campaigners have described Belton's case as an abuse of the UK's libel system. Abramovich was personally sued by the former Financial Times journalist and publisher.
It is understood that the settlement was made following an approach by Abramovich. HarperCollins said Belton had always been willing to include the oligarch's comments on the allegations, and acknowledged that books on controversial contemporary themes needed updating as new information emerged.
At a preliminary hearing in November, Mrs Justice Tipples ruled that several passages in the book that Abramovich said conveyed untrue statements about him were potentially defamatory of him.
One such claim was the suggestion that Abramovich was under the control of Putin and that the oligarch was obliged to make the fortune from his business empire available for the use of President Putin and his regime Tipples wrote in a 34-sided ruling. She ruled that three of four sections complained of by Rosneft were not defamatory, with the oil firm subsequently shelving its case.
Tipples emphasised that the court was only adjudicating on meaning. It was not decided whether the allegations about Abramovich or anyone else were true or false. The claims will not be tested in court after Wednesday s settlement.
The lawyer for Abramovich said at the initial hearing that the book repeated lazy inaccuracies about Abramovich's role in various events and made false and damaging statements about him that were completely without foundation. Belton spent seven years writing Putin s People and was based in Moscow as a bureau chief for the FT, named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in jail.