Dad-of-nine who demanded £425k taxpayer-funded house loses harassment case against The Sun

A DAD-of-nine who sued The Sun for harassment after we revealed he had demanded a £425,000 tax-payer funded council house has lost his case.

We told how Cameroon-born Arnold Sube and wife Jeanne, both 35, bagged a five-bed detached after turning their noses up at three previous properties.

The Subes, who were put up in a hotel by the local council while they waited for a big enough house, took the paper to court saying the story amounted to harassment.

But a judge rejected their claims after deciding our report was fair and in the public interest and threw the claim out after a three-day trial.

If they had won their no-win no-fee case it could have opened the floodgates to s string of claims, effectively ending the media’s ability to shine the spotlight on public interest stories like this.

A court judgement published today, showed Mr and Mrs Sube were left feeling “very upset” at the stories.

They told the High Court: “People had been made to believe things about me which were not true.”

The couple even suggested the articles were racist, stating they had been written in an “indignant tone designed to incite… racial and /or xenophobic hatred”.

They told the court they wanted financial settlement in their favour as the stories left them anxious and also for losing out on cash as a result of the exposure.

And they even claimed they had taken their demands for a bigger home to local paper – but believed it was a citizens advice bureau.

In a definitive ruling, High Court judge Mr Justice Warby emphatically ruled: “I do not, however, accept that the Subes were victims of harassment”.

The judge rejected a claim that the 2018 articles we published set out to “encourage third parties to publish racial attacks upon the claimants”.

“I could not make out there was any such intention,” he added.

The judge said: “The subject matter of the articles was of legitimate interest to the public” and that the articles in our paper were not “offensive, insulting, alarming or distressing”.

And he said our paper was doing what it does best to shine a light on stories of interest to our readers.

“Focusing on the coverage in The Sun, it was reporting on matters of proper interest to the readership of The Sun.

“It was done in a colourful fashion typical of tabloid journalism, of which some may disapprove, but it did not represent an abuse of press freedom that entered the realm of harassment.”

Similar claims against The Express newspaper were also thrown out.