Financial Instruments in UK Law

A fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for or on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances which give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence. The distinguishing obligation of a fiduciary is the obligation of loyalty.

Sigma financed its investments over a 13 year period by debt securities issued or guaranteed by it. It entered into liquidity facilities intended to hedge against market liquidity risks. It entered into financial instruments intended to hedge against currency and interest rate risk. Others provided liquidity facilities, or entered into financial hedging instruments.

Where a security document secures a number of creditors who have advanced funds over a long period it would be quite wrong to take account of circumstances which are not known to all of them. In this type of case it is the wording of the instrument which is paramount. The instrument must be interpreted as a whole in the light of the commercial intention which may be inferred from the face of the instrument and from the nature of the debtor's business.

The difficulty is to establish the relationship between the law as laid down in Morgan and the long standing principle laid down in the abuse of confidence cases viz. the law requires those in a fiduciary position who enter into transactions with those to whom they owe fiduciary duties to establish affirmatively that the transaction was a fair one: see for example Demarara Bauxite Co. Ltd. v. Hubbard [1923] A.C. 673; Moodie v. Cox and Hatt [1917] 2 Ch. 71 and the discussion in the Aboody case, at pp. 962G–964C.

A resulting, implied or constructive trust—and it is unnecessary for present purposes to distinguish between these three classes of trust—is created by a transaction between the trustee and the cestui qui trust in connection with the acquisition by the trustee of a legal estate in land, whenever the trustee has so conducted himself that it would be inequitable to allow him to deny to the cestui qui trust a beneficial interest in the land acquired.

The law has indeed moved on in response to changing social and economic conditions. The search is to ascertain the parties' shared intentions, actual, inferred or imputed, with respect to the property in the light of their whole course of conduct in relation to it.

Secondly, the claimant must satisfy the court that there is a good arguable case that the claim against the foreign defendant falls within one or more of the classes of case for which leave to serve out of the jurisdiction may be given.