Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. Ismaik v Fadaat Media 28. The first thing the article conveys is that Mr Ismaik is to be understood as an ‘Arab Zionist’, that is a bad thing, and he has made attempts at ‘varnishing his image’. So the reader is prepared from the outset to expect the piece to unpack this composite proposition. 29. The very next thing conveyed is that Mr Ismaik was convicted in Jordan ‘in financial cases involving petty sums of money’. There is no real doubt about the meaning of that, and no real dispute between the parties about it. Mr Ismaik’s pleaded meaning draws out to the foreground that it means he ‘is a convicted criminal’; and Fadaat Media’s pushes into the background that he ‘was, in the past, convicted’. In my view, both of these add micro-commentary which is unnecessary to understanding the meaning conveyed, and which over-elaborates the process by which an ordinary reader would simply absorb the core factual information without fine analysis. 30. In my view, the natural and ordinary meaning of this allegation is that: Mr Ismaik was convicted in Jordan in financial cases involving petty sums of money. This is plainly an imputation of fact at Chase level 1 – that Mr Ismaik was guilty of the misconduct alleged against him. It is equally plainly of defamatory tendency – criminal convictions are the epitome of conduct gravely violating generally-held values and norms, and people would tend to think much less well of someone convicted of financial crime, however ‘petty’ the amounts involved. (iii) The ‘prosecution’ allegation 31. In the next sentence, the article says Mr Ismaik caused the resignation of the Governor of the Central Bank of Jordan ‘after he was prosecuted in a major money laundering case’. 32. This is another factual allegation of clear defamatory tendency, but the parties disagree over the Chase level – Mr Ismaik fears it is a level 1 imputation of guilt, while Fadaat Media says it is at most a level 2 imputation that there are (or were) reasonable grounds to suspect him of guilt. 33. The more serious interpretation relies on two things. The first is the smoke of scandal which envelops this allegation and is said to be suggestive of the underlying fire of truth. Mr Ismaik is said to have ‘fled’ to the UAE after his conviction and returned with vast unexplained wealth; and then there is the resignation of the Governor of the Bank. The second relies on the ‘repetition rule’ – that by repeating the previous allegation (by prosecutors) of money laundering against Mr Ismaik without recognisable distance, qualification or balance, the article is in effect making it afresh. 34. I agree the reader is being invited to infer there is no smoke without fire. But I am not persuaded the reader would easily make the jump to an equivalence of an imputation of guilt. It is in my view a strained interpretation of this text to read the ‘prosecution’ reference as an unqualified allegation of guilt (and I was shown no comparable authority which has done so). Here, the allegation of prosecution is made in close proximity to the allegation of conviction (which is later repeated in the article); there is in my view a clear contextual contrast between the two, which the ordinary reader