The High Court in Belfast has set aside a £300,000 judgment previously granted in favour of Neil and Donna Sands against Sebastian Bond, the founder of commentary website Tattle Life, following findings of serious and repeated failures by the plaintiffs to comply with their duty of full and frank disclosure. Mr Justice Humphreys, sitting on 5 May 2026, also ruled that both the original writ and the application to enter judgment in default had not been properly served on the first and third defendants.

Neil and Donna Sands commenced proceedings on 23 June 2023, seeking damages and injunctive relief over material published on Tattle Life between February 2021 and May 2023. The claims included harassment, misuse of private information, breach of data protection rights and defamation. Tattle Life describes itself as a commentary website on public business social media accounts, permitting members of the public to comment on and criticise individuals who choose to monetise their personal lives as a business. The defendants were initially named as persons unknown operating under the pseudonym Tattle Life. The defendants identified were Bond, Yuzu Zest Limited - a company formerly connected with the operation of Tattle Life and now in members' voluntary liquidation - and Kumquat Tree Limited, a Hong Kong company said to own and operate the website.

Judgment in default was entered on 1 December 2023 in the sum of £300,000, split equally between the two plaintiffs, along with costs. A worldwide freezing order covering assets up to £1.8 million was also made against all defendants. Bond and Kumquat Tree subsequently applied to have the proceedings struck out as an abuse of process, to have the substituted service order set aside, and to challenge the validity of service of the writ.

On 6 March 2026, a solicitor for the plaintiffs swore an affidavit stating that his previous evidence had been incomplete. He accepted that Bond had been the principal focus of the investigation and that information known about him should have been disclosed to the court at the time of the ex parte applications in 2023. He characterised the omissions as honest mistakes rather than deliberate attempts to mislead or gain a tactical advantage.

The court found that had full disclosure been made at the first ex parte hearing, the judge would have directed service on Bond by first class post at his known address in Poole and by use of multiple email addresses identified through the plaintiffs' own research. The court concluded the substituted service order would not have been made had the plaintiffs met their disclosure obligations. It further found that significant developments between September and December 2023 were not brought to the court's attention, and that when the judge asked directly about the identification of the defendants at the December 2023 hearing, the answer given - that identification had not yet been achieved - was materially deficient. The court described the disclosure failures as egregious, repeated, and spanning two years across multiple ex parte applications.

On the question of service, the court found that what was sent to the defendants was a Mimecast file-sharing link requiring an access code, rather than documents attached directly to an email as required by the substituted service order. The plaintiffs were aware that the access code had never been requested, meaning the documents had not been accessed. The court held that a plaintiff who departs from normal service methods must inform the court if documents are not downloaded, particularly when seeking orders enforceable by punitive sanction. The defendants' solicitors stated that the proceedings did not come to Bond's attention until documents were sent on 16 June 2025 and were confirmed downloaded on that date. The court found the plaintiffs had failed to establish that Bond had known of the proceedings and dismissed the application to deem service good.

The court dismissed the application to strike out the proceedings as an abuse of process, finding the court process had not been used in a way significantly different from its ordinary and proper purpose. However, the substituted service order was set aside, the writ was declared not served on the first and third defendants, and the judgment against them was set aside as a consequence. The worldwide freezing order was also set aside. The judgment against Yuzu Zest Limited, whose liquidators had been aware of it since December 2024 and had taken no steps to challenge it, remains enforceable.