ROUGH START

Lawyers for Putin’s ‘Chef’ Abandon Libel Case Against Bellingcat Founder

Yevgeny Prigozhin is suing investigator journalist Eliot Huggins over a series of reports that exposed his ties to the shady Wagner Group.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s libel suit against investigative journalist Eliot Higgins is already off to a rough start. Prigozhin, 60, a catering magnate known as “Putin’s chef,” filed suit against Higgins, the founder of investigative website Bellingcat, in December after the news site published reports revealing Prigozhin’s close ties to the Kremlin and his work running the shady Wagner Group, a mercenary organization operating in conflicts in Ukraine, Africa, and the Middle East. The lawsuit goes after Higgins personally for five tweets he blasted out to his 140,000-plus followers. But Prigozhin’s lawyers, Lawyers Discreet Law LLP, told a U.K. court on Thursday that they wanted to withdraw from the case, presumably due to increasing pressure on British firms to drop Russian clients who have been sanctioned amid the Ukraine war. The Law Gazette reported that a judge conducted a hearing on the firms submission in private.