Borrower Names

The details are in the portals, but this is a private unfunded forum and I guess the mods don't want to be sued due to any statement anyone here says.

Edit

sorry mrc, you beat me to it and did a better job

A borrower is within their rights to sue a poster or the forum for anything at any time but it is not remotely close to being true that merely publishing their name and details here would be defamatory. The threshold for defamation is much higher than just giving someone's name and some true factual information about them. For actions in Great Britain the Defamation Act 2013 provides significant protection against casual meritless suing. A look at the base requirements should help to understand some of the difficulty of successfully acting:

(1)A statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant.

(2)For the purposes of this section, harm to the reputation of a body that trades for profit is not “serious harm” unless it has caused or is likely to cause the body serious financial loss.

While this place may be well indexed it is still quite hard for a statement here to do serious harm because of the relatively low chance of searches being made and the possible position of this place in any search results if a just name is passed to a search engine.

Moving beyond whether something is potentially defamatory, then there's the public interest defence to consider, one way of qualifying being:

"(3)If the statement complained of was, or formed part of, an accurate and impartial account of a dispute to which the claimant was a party, the court must in determining whether it was reasonable for the defendant to believe that publishing the statement was in the public interest disregard any omission of the defendant to take steps to verify the truth of the imputation conveyed by it."

So for example, I can quite safely know that I am not defaming Bondora when I write that Bondora told me that there would be no charges on the secondary market from 26 November 2015 then continued to charge both buyers and sellers 1.5% of the amount sold unless the seller first removed the offer to sell then re-added it from the 26th onwards. This is because it is clearly in the public interest for others to know about such conduct and also even if the public interest aspect didn't apply, it's a true statement, another defence. It's also my opinion that Bondora's recent application for a P2P license from the FCA should be declined to protect the public from Bondora, partly because of conduct like that.

Thanks for that james a very useful, informative overview.

That's appears to be very much the law but working practically with in it is where the sticky bit comes.

One other issue is "jigsaw libel" where no one actual person said anything libelous but the sum of statements by several Posters in a long thread effectively id's and then besmirches them.

Yes and in practice it's good to remember that in spite of legal ethics people can and do bring meritless cases to court. Not being on the fine edge of what is acceptable is quite desirable.

Jigsaw identification across sites and media forms is quite an issue. It's actually one thing that I watch out for to avoid people being able to conclusively identify me from my posts, though the potential risks of that have been decreasing over time for a range of reasons. At times I'll post then remove some things later, for example. Or moving back to defamation, as the facts change I'll sometimes go back and edit older posts to reflect the latest situation rather than leaving unchanged the original description, normally only where I think that the commercial implications are significant enough that a meritless case against me might be attempted.

When it comes to P2P platforms we do have some protection in theory from the FOS and FCA because firms are not supposed to squelch discussion, even sometimes inaccurate discussion, about their products or conduct. As usual supposed and actual conduct can differ.

But I presume that the borrowers have bought in to this - they're presumably treating it as a marketing channel. So it's not the same as identifying a random borrower.

All quite true. Often it's the case that I've redacted a name as someone thinks it's a Borrower, but it's far from clear if they are or are not. So for safety's sake we err on the side of caution removing most business names, Borrower or not. If anyone thinks we've gone too far and a particular name should be re-instated, please just report the post again simply explaining why the redacted detail(s) should be put back. It might take a little while but with a good and legal reason there's every chance it will be reinstated.
 
To give what at the moment seems to be an unhappy example of naming or publicizing a Borrower. There is a school that borrowed from a platform and soon got into difficulties but then found a Trustee who was prepared to redeem the loan and thus save the school from closure only to find that the local media and the BBC were talking about their business difficulties on air/internet. This caused the Trustee to pull out and collapsed the deal. It's now looking that the school will close. In this case I don't think the fact that there was a loan in the background was mentioned, but I would hate for it to be the case that the school had to close for something that we mentioned on here.