Google settles ex-Morgan Stanley banker suit over Web abuse

A former Morgan Stanley banker settled his suit with Google Inc. in the U.K. over "vile" comments on the Internet accusing him of being a Nazi and a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Daniel Hegglin and Google agreed on the settlement as a five-day trial was scheduled to begin in London where the banker was going to ask the company to remove the defamatory comments from some websites. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

"The settlement includes significant efforts on Google's part to remove the abusive material," Hugh Tomlinson, Hegglin's lawyer, said in a statement in court. "Hegglin will now concentrate his energies on bringing the person responsible for this campaign of harassment to justice."

Google has a tougher battle to defend against such lawsuits after a European Union court ruling in a Spanish case earlier this year set out a right to be forgotten and confirmed that the company controls data on its servers and must comply with EU law, said Gideon Benaim, a lawyer at Michael Simkins LLP who represents clients seeking to remove information from the web.

"Cases taken in the future ought to have a different result than they would have had prior to the Google Spain ruling and we should see that filtering through," Benaim said in a phone interview. "For too long search engines have hidden, claiming not to be the publishers."

Hegglin, who is based in Hong Kong, was subject to abuse on more than 4,000 different websites, Tomlinson said today. He was accused of being a corrupt businessman, insider trading, and of laundering money on behalf of the Italian mafia, according to a pre-trial ruling in July.

There is no evidence to suggest any of the claims are true, Judge David Bean said in a ruling published July 31.

"Google has considerable sympathy for Mr. Hegglin in what is an exceptional case of Internet trolling," Anthony White, Google's lawyer, said in court. "Google provides search services to millions of people and cannot be responsible for policing Internet content."

Google has been cutting links to search results on its European sites that point to outdated and irrelevant information about people after the EU's top court told it that privacy rights trump publication in some circumstances.

The company has removed 41.7 percent of a total of 594,929 search links it analyzed since the EU court ruling in May, according to data last updated Nov. 23 on Google's transparency report. Google has received 172,752 removal requests so far, according to the report.