Newsweek Hit with ‘Indemnity Costs’ After UK High Court Finds It Abused Process

Newsweek has been ordered to pay £132,322, about $177,000, toward a London company’s legal costs after Britain’s High Court found the magazine had pursued “a high risk strategy in the knowledge that the debt was disputed.” The company, court filings say, had already been stripped of its staff and its business four years earlier.

In a judgment handed down on July 30, 2026, Insolvency and Companies Court Judge Agnello KC dismissed Newsweek Publishing LLC’s application to lift an injunction barring it from filing a winding-up petition against NW Publishing UK Ltd (NW UK) — the British procedure for forcing a company into involuntary liquidation. She ordered Newsweek to pay NW UK’s costs of both applications, an agreed £132,322, by 4 p.m. London time on Aug. 13.

The judge’s language was unequivocal. “It is an abuse of process to present a petition in relation to a debt which is disputed,” she held, finding that Newsweek had known the debt was disputed and proceeded anyway.

Indemnity costs are not the ordinary order. In England, unlike in the United States, the losing side normally pays the winner’s legal fees. The indemnity basis is the tougher tier, awarded where a party’s conduct takes a case out of the norm, and it leaves the paying party covering substantially more of the other side’s bill than a standard assessment allows.

Newsweek had also accused NW UK of misleading the court to obtain the injunction, alleging that NW UK had breached its duty of full and frank Disclosure, the English rule that a party seeking an urgent injunction must volunteer the facts that cut against its own case. The judge rejected that comprehensively. “There was no material non-disclosure,” she found. “The presentation of the application was fair in all material respects.” Any perceived non-disclosure, she added, arose mainly from Newsweek’s own impression of its case rather than the objective position.

What the court found

Newsweek served a statutory demand on NW UK on July 3, 2025 a formal payment demand that, left unanswered, opens the door to a liquidation petition. It covered two sums: a £121,000 (about $162,000) security deposit and a £180,000 (about $241,000) settlement payment made to a landlord.

NW UK’s lawyers set out the grounds on which both sums were disputed and asked for an undertaking, a promise to the court that binds the party giving it, that no winding-up petition would follow. Newsweek refused. It replied at length rejecting that any dispute existed at all, and offered only short, time-limited confirmations that it would not file a petition, first until July 31, then until Aug. 5, in each case less time than what NW UK had asked for.

That, the judge found, is what forced NW UK to court. Newsweek’s approach “heightened the risk that the Applicant [NW UK] would need to seek injunctive relief,” she held, noting that even after being made aware of the dispute Newsweek maintained it was entitled to file a petition.

NW UK paid the £180,000 to the landlord directly on Aug. 1, 2025, and told Newsweek on the morning of Aug. 4 the day Newsweek’s latest reprieve expired, asking again for an undertaking. Newsweek did not reply. NW UK applied for the injunction after hours the same day.

Newsweek’s central argument was that NW UK had jumped the gun: had it waited, an undertaking would have been given and no application would have been needed. The judge did not accept it. Newsweek “was well aware that the confirmation it had provided expired that day,” she found, and “there was no explanation as to why no reply was provided.” Newsweek would have known that failing to reply urgently would in all likelihood send NW UK to court.

She also rejected the argument that NW UK’s payment of the larger sum made a petition unthinkable. A debtor faced with a demand covering several debts, she held, may pay the one it admits and seek relief over the one it disputes, an approach she described as common.

Newsweek gave a permanent undertaking not to file a petition only after the injunction was served. It then applied to lift the injunction anyway. That application was dismissed.

The company that was emptied

The dispute reaches back to what happened to NW Publishing UK in 2022.

The company was incorporated on Nov. 29, 2018, to run Newsweek’s British operation. Its only director is William Dove; its shareholders are Dove and Pragad. By early 2022 it employed around 70 people, including journalists whose work, according to NW UK, generated a substantial share of Newsweek’s traffic and revenue.

The judgment records NW UK’s case that its business and assets were stripped by the Newsweek group, with a new UK entity set up to provide the services NW UK had been providing, and that the transfer was wrongful and left NW UK unable to trade. The judge made no finding on that question; it was not before her.

The detail behind it is stark. The new company, NW Media Publishing UK Ltd, a name almost indistinguishable from NW Publishing UK Ltd, was incorporated on March 3, 2022, with Pragad as its sole director and sole shareholder. Dove, the only director of the company whose business was about to move, was not told. The day before, according to NW UK’s filings, Amit Shah, Pragad’s senior financial executive, emailed Dove a document, without explanation, that would have confirmed the termination of his directorship. Dove did not sign it.

On March 13, lawyers for Newsweek’s US holding company terminated the relationship. About two weeks later Dove’s Newsweek email account was suspended; he has never regained access to his correspondence or many of the company’s records. The filings also state that on April 3, NW UK’s own human resources manager wrote to NW UK’s staff inviting them to move to the new company. All but two went.

When NW UK alleged wrongdoing, the holding company denied it, and took the position that it was entitled to deal with NW UK’s assets as it saw fit because NW UK had operated as part of Newsweek. That remains, in substance, Newsweek’s answer.

Why the debt was disputed

What was left was a company with almost no staff, no Newsweek funding, and a lease in Canary Wharf, London’s financial district.

NW UK had leased the premises in February 2020 for the benefit of the Newsweek business. Newsweek Publishing LLC funded the security deposit and guaranteed the lease at the landlord’s request, though no guarantee contract was ever executed between the two companies. The deposit deed expressly stated that the deposit belonged to NW UK and that NW UK was entitled to its return.

The judgment records NW UK’s case that the two companies had a symbiotic relationship: all Newsweek revenue was sent to the US entities, and money was sent back to London as and when NW UK needed it. On that footing, NW UK argued, it could only ever have repaid Newsweek out of funds Newsweek gave it, which is why it disputed owing Newsweek either sum.

The judge did not decide whether that case is right. She decided it was substantial enough that threatening to liquidate the company over it was an abuse.

The wider fight

The London ruling lands amid a broader dispute over Newsweek’s ownership.

In 2016, Pragad became chief executive of IBT Media, this publication’s parent company, which accuses Pragad of stealing the company. The alleged vehicle was NW Media Holdings Corp, a US holding company created to own Newsweek and separate it from IBT Media. NW Publishing UK was created in London as part of that same restructuring. IBT Media’s position is that Pragad transferred most of IBT’s assets to Newsweek, including editorial staff and clients, and that the London company was hollowed out the same way.

On April 24, 2026, IBT Media served notice on NW Media Holdings that the 2018 sale agreement was never consummated. The closing payment was never made by NW Media Holdings Corp or by any other entity or individual, a fact that is undisputed by all parties.

Disclosure: International Business Times is published by IBTimes LLC, a subsidiary of IBT Media Inc., which is in ongoing litigation with Dev Pragad and NW Media Holdings Corp. over ownership of Newsweek. IBT Media is not a party to the London proceedings described here.