Dear Mr Wallis,

Thank you for clarifying the meaning of your remarks about lawyers backed by those with “bank balances from Lehman Brothers that can’t be tracked down”. We will be reproducing that part of your email that clarifies these remarks on our website, as promised.

We will not be reproducing your whole email, because some of the specific accusations you make against us in the rest of the message are simply untrue. It is unfortunate that you chose to forward these accusations to UCU’s General Secretary and UCL UCU Branch committee.

Similarly, we were upset to hear that a trade union meeting of 60 people debated a motion that claimed we were deliberately trying to “smear [your] name”. This is a serious and false charge made by the original author of the motion.

We have considered your comments:

In our original article, we claim you made remarks linking anti-boycott legal action to untraceable Lehman Brother accounts. We note that you accept making these remarks in your response.

We also state that it was not entirely clear what you meant by those remarks. You have now explained that you were referring to “wealthy individuals” who would no longer have the wherewithal to take action against UCU.

As someone who was present for the BRICUP fringe event, I do not find this explanation particularly convincing, especially as you were speaking specifically at that point about the threats the Union faced from legal action. Obviously, I have no way of knowing what you were thinking when you spoke, but we are comfortable with our original claim – that it was not, at the time, entirely obvious what you meant.

These are the only assertions about you in our report. We stand by our original report and are not inclined to withdraw it. We do not accept your claim that a failure to remove a true and accurate report would indicate complicity in a smear campaign.
Yours sincerely,

Arieh Kovler
Fair Play Campaign Group