El Ajou v Dollar Land Holdings Plc
Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
Judgment Date | 06 December 1995 |
Date | 06 December 1995 |
Court | Chancery Division |
Chancery Division
Before Mr Justice Robert Walker
Fraud - tracing - pleading rights of third party
Tracing, in equity, depended not on the actual imposition of an equitable charge but on equity's capacity to impose such a charge; the charge was notional. There was no inflexible rule, that a defendant fundholder might, or might not, resist a plaintiff's claim to trace his own money into that fund by pleading the rights of a third party.
Mr Justice Robert Walker so held, on a remission to the Chancery Division by the Court of Appeal (The Times January 3, 1994; (1994) 2 All ER 685) for the purpose of decision on quantum, of an action by the plaintiff, Mr Abdul Ghani El Ajou, against Dollar Holdings plc, based on the knowing receipt by that company of £2.325 million, part of the proceeds of a massive share fraud carried out in Amsterdam by three Canadians between November 1984 and November 1985, which it invested in the acquisition of a site in Battersea.
Mr Roger Ellis for the plaintiff; Mr Romie Tager for the company.
MR JUSTICE ROBERT WALKER said that further evidence before him given by Mr Van Apeldoorn, a member of the Amsterdam Bar, appointed by the Dutch court as trustee in bankruptcy of the Canadians' companies, had established, inter alia, that (a) their share-pushing operation was wholly fraudulent, worthless shares being sold to about 4,000 would-be investors, namely, to the plaintiff and the other 1985 victims; (b) so far as Mr Van Apeldoorn knew, the plaintiff's had been the only individual claim brought against the company, and (c) the plaintiff and he, on the other victims' behalf, had agreed that the proceeds of the present action should be divided 70:30 between the plaintiff and them.
Mr Ellis had submitted that in the light of the 70:30 agreement and the near certainty that no further individual claim would now be made by any of the other victims, there was nothing inequitable in the order he sought, for payment of the whole of the £2.325 million to the plaintiff.
Although one of many, he was the only victim whose lost assets had, to the tune of $6.673 million, been specifically traceable to that sum received by the company.
Mr Tager, submitting that it was open to any of the other 1985 victims similarly to trace their losses to identifiable "laundered money", argued that not the whole, but only a fraction, of that £2.325 million could belong in equity to the...
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