Anti-fur trade group closes after libel defeat

Lynx, the anti-fur trade pressure group, has gone into voluntary liquidation after losing a libel case against a mink farmer.

The group was unable to pay pounds 40,000 damages and more than pounds 100,000 costs awarded to Leo Sawrij, a fur farmer of Swales Mink Farms Ltd, in November last year at the High Court in London. He had denied the group's claims that animals at the farm, near Halifax, were kept in cruel conditions.

Carol McKenna, a spokeswoman for Lynx, said: 'It was finally decided that we could no longer go on and so we went into voluntary liquidation last Friday.' The charity relied on membership donations, Ms McKenna said, and although a fighting fund was set up to contest the libel case it was impossible to continue once it was lost.

She said that since 1985, when the group was founded, fur sales in the UK had dropped from pounds 61m to pounds 15m in 1990.