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On April 22, 2003, the Daily Telegraph published documents which had been found by its reporter David Blair in the ruins of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. The documents purport to be records of meetings between Galloway and Iraqi intelligence agents, and state that he had received a salary of £375,000 per year from the proceeds of the Oil for Food programme.
The papers were found amonst other documents including correspondence with Edward Heath, Robin Cook, and a UK cleric. Those people have confirmed that the correspondence was genuine.
Hassan Mneimneh, head of the Iraq Research and Documentation Project in Washington, examined copies of two pages of the Daily Telegraph's documents linking Galloway with the Hussein regime and pronounced them consistent with authentic Iraqi documents he has seen.
Galloway completely denied the story, insisting that the documents were forgeries, and pointing to the questionable nature of the discovery within an unguarded bombed-out building. He instigated legal action against the newspaper, which was heard in the High Court from November 14, 2004.
The authenticity of the Telegraph documents was never questioned in court. Galloways case was based upon his claim that comments made by the paper in relation to the documents were "outrageous and incredibly damaging", not that the documents were, as he later claimed, forgeries.
The Telegraphs case, without claiming justification (a defence in which the defendant bears the onus of proving that the defamatory reports are true), sought to argue that it acted responsibly because the allegations it reported were of sufficient public interest to outweigh the damage caused to Galloway's reputation.
However, the court ruled that "It was the defendants' primary case that their coverage was no more than 'neutral reportage' ...but the nature, content and tone of their coverage cannot be so described".
On December 2, Justice David Eady ruled that the story had been "seriously defamatory", and that the Telegraph was "obliged to compensate Mr Galloway... and to make an award for the purposes of restoring his reputation". Galloway was awarded £150,000 damages plus costs estimated to total £1.2 million.
On 18th April 2005 The Telegraph won permission to appeal against the High Court ruling.
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