A couple of weeks ago, I posted in genuine admiration of Ryan Giggs. Now Schillings have set out to destory his reputation, and rook him of several hundred thousand pounds at the same time. Guido has a good graph:

Plainly Ryan Giggs internet skills are not great, or he could easilly have discovered that would happen.

Schillings did the same thing for Alisher Usmanov, Britain’s second richest man. Schillings had written to all UK mainstream media what is known as a “chilling” letter. It stated that the Uzbek billionaire Usmanov had been in jail in the Soviet Union as a political prisoner, and had been pardoned after President Gorbachev came to power, and that anyone who published anything different would be sued. Our useless mainstream media has still, to this day, not published anything different.

In the interest of veracity I posted what I knew from my time as British Ambassador in Uzbekistan. Usmanov was never a political prisoner. He was a gangster jailed for extortion. He had not been pardoned by Gorbachev. He was pardoned by the state of Uzbekistan, under his gangster friend President Karimov.

Schillings threatened repeatedly to sue me, but they never did, because they know it is true. They threatened to sue my then webhosts, who were so scared they pulled not only my site but many others on the same server. They particularly threatened many Arsenal fan blogs, as Usmanov was trying to take over the club at the time.

The result was that millions of people worldwide, who otherwise would never have heard of Usmanov, learnt he had a conviction for blackmail as the story went viral. I have been told for cetain that the internet furore directly impacted on the willingness of major Arsenal shareholders to sell to Usmanov. Schillings caused the failure of Usmanov’s bid to take over Arsenal. If they had allowed the truth about him to live quietly in a small corner of the internet, that would not have happened.

Even though Schillings never did sue, our power-serving mainstream media has still never mentioned the truth about Usmanov’s criminal past, even when he was last month announced as Brtian’s second richest man. That is why the freedom of new media is so important, and why Ryan Giggs is wrong.

But if you have enough money, you can with effort even influence new media. The Usmanov/Craig Murray affair used to feature prminently on the Wikipedia “Streisand Effect” page linked to above. It has been edited out – when and by whom? It has also disappeared from Usmanov’s own Wikipedia page. And recently on Arsenal blogs, there have been a rash of commenters calling for Usmanov to take over, often repeating the same long comment across several Arsenal blogs. That kind of money buys a lot of trolls.