Ambrosiadou v Coward
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Mr Justice Eady |
| Judgment Date | 15 July 2010 |
| Neutral Citation | [2010] EWHC 1794 (QB) |
| Docket Number | Case No: HQ10X02210 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
| Date | 15 July 2010 |
[2010] EWHC 1794 (QB)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
Before: The Honourable Mr Justice Eady
Case No: HQ10X02210
Richard Spearman QC, Mark Warby QC and Justin Rushbrooke (instructed by Schillings) for the Claimant
Desmond Browne QC and William Bennett (instructed by Hogan Lovells International LLP) for the Defendant
Hearing dates: 21–22 June 2010
Mr Justice Eady:
On 4 June 2010, at some point after 9 p.m., Maddison J granted the Claimant an injunction against her husband in these terms:
“Until after the Return Date or further Order of the Court in the meantime:
(1) The Respondent must not deal with or part with possession of the following documents or any of the them (‘the Documents’) (save by delivering the Documents up to the Applicant's solicitors and save to the extent provided by paragraph 7 below):
(a) the Petition of the Applicant, the Counterclaim of the Respondent, and the Respondent's application for provisional measures dated 19 May 2010 in the divorce proceedings in Greece between the Applicant and the Respondent (‘the Divorce Proceedings’);
(b) any other documents filed or served in the Divorce Proceedings or which relate to the Divorce Proceedings or which have been brought into existence as a result of the Divorce Proceedings including without limiting the generality of the foregoing the originals or copies of or extracts from any applications, witness statements, affidavits, orders, judgments, transcripts of hearings, correspondence and the ‘bunch of papers filed in a Greek Court last week by Martin Coward’ which are referred to in the email dated 1 June 2010 (sent at about 15.04 pm) from Louise Armitstead of the Telegraph to Gill Ackers; and
(2) The Respondent must not use and must not publish or communicate or disclose to any other person (other than (i) by way of disclosure to legal advisers instructed in relation to these proceedings for the purpose of obtaining legal advice in relation to these proceedings or (ii) for the purpose of carrying this Order into effect) any information or claims extracted or derived from the Documents or any of them
PROVIDED ALWAYS that nothing in this paragraph of this Order shall be taken to either prevent or allow the Respondent to use publish communicate or disclose information or claims which he possesses independently of the contents of the Documents; and
(3) The Respondent must not cause or authorise any other person, firm or company to do any of those acts.
PROVIDED ALWAYS THAT the above prohibitions shall not apply if and to the extent that at the date of this Order or at any time hereafter the Documents or any of them are or become generally accessible to the public other than as a result of a breach of this Order or a breach of confidence or privacy on the part of any person (including for the avoidance of doubt any distribution to Bell Yard of the Documents).”
The matter came before me on the return date and was argued on 21 and 22 June. The original injunction was extended until the handing down of this judgment. On 8 July, the date originally intended for the hand down, I heard submissions from the parties as to how much detail should be included in the judgment and there was a postponement, with a further extension of the injunction to cover the period until an application for permission to appeal was determined.
As will have become apparent from the terms of the order itself, the parties are husband and wife and are currently engaged in contested divorce proceedings (both in Greece and in Monaco). There is a 13-year-old son of the marriage and one of the important aspects of the Defendant's application in Greece, which was heard in part on 27 May 2010, was concerned with protecting the best interests of the son.
As it happens, the parties are also closely linked in relation to a hedge fund business to which they have both devoted many years of their lives. IKOS CIF Ltd is a company incorporated under the laws of Cyprus in which they worked together until last year. It was founded in 1992 and proved to be very successful. Since 2005 it has carried on business from Cyprus and in 2007 it was valued, according to the Defendant, at one billion dollars. On 23 December 2008 the Claimant summarily dismissed the Defendant's IKOS research team. Two of its members had been responsible, together with the Defendant, for designing and operating the trading systems. This act was apparently the casus belli so far as the marriage was concerned. The Defendant only discovered what had happened three days afterwards.
In the aftermath of the events in December 2008, the Claimant began divorce proceedings in Thessaloniki on 23 April 2009. As Maddison J's order records, the Defendant counterclaimed in those proceedings on 28 January of this year. Shortly before that, on 19 January, the Claimant had begun a second set of divorce proceedings in Monaco.
The parties appear to be agreed that the matrimonial proceedings and their business affairs are inextricably linked. The Claimant remains chief executive officer of IKOS. In the Defendant's witness statement, he describes how the business relationship also impacts upon the son's affairs. He suggests that steps need to be taken in relation to the son's trust fund, most of which has been concentrated in IKOS.
The Defendant's application notice in the Greek proceedings dated 19 May 2010, to which reference is made in Maddison J's order of 4 June, sought provisional measures concerning such matters as contact with the son, his education and the management of his financial affairs.
An order was made on 27 May at a relatively brief hearing, dealing with contact and other matters. The detail does not need to be set out for present purposes.
I was told that a further hearing of the Defendant's application was due to take place in Thessaloniki on 23 June (i.e. the day after the hearing before me concluded). After the hearing, I was informed as to what had taken place. It seems that the substantive issues went off to a date in October – primarily because of a lawyers' strike in Greece. The order of 27 May was varied in certain respects. I entertained further evidence as to the status of those proceedings, which grew somewhat heated, as the parties were vehemently disagreeing as to whether the earlier hearing took place in private and as to the extent of privacy attaching to court papers. I understand that the hearing on 23 June was itself in public. This is likely to be so in relation to future hearings also, unless an order is made to the contrary.
Mr Browne QC, for the Defendant, highlights the first of the two provisos in the order made by Maddison J, arguing that this undermines the main thrust of the order itself and renders it pointless. It is said that the restrictions could be circumvented by simply publishing material from the Defendant's own recollection and sources without using the vehicle of the Greek court documents.
Mr Spearman QC, on behalf of the Claimant, does not attempt to obtain any restriction upon the publication or use by the Defendant of information already available to him. As he explained to Maddison J, he had no evidence of any threat or intention on the Defendant's part with regard to publishing any information save by means of the court documents. He pointed out to the court that at no time between handing in his resignation letter, on or about 11 December 2009, and the present time has there been any evidence of publication by any other route. Mr Spearman does not, of course, concede that the Defendant would be entitled to breach obligations of confidence by any means at all. He simply recognises that he had no evidence of an apprehended breach such as to justify applying to the court for interim injunctive relief – save in respect of the use of court documents from the Greek proceedings.
It is quite possible that the Defendant believed, perhaps on legal advice, that if the matters he wished to canvass in public were mentioned in open court, whether in Greece or elsewhere, they could then be reported and referred to in public without his incurring legal liability (whether for libel or breach of confidence). If that is so, this could be the reason for the Defendant's silence over many months and would rather suggest that the injunction, far from being pointless, would have the effect of depriving him of the only route to publishing the controversial information of which he intends to avail himself.
Indeed, it is Mr Spearman's suggestion that the Defendant in his application notice of 19 May, before the court in Thessaloniki, adopted the device of including matters that were largely irrelevant to the substance of the application purely because he wanted to get them into the public domain. In particular, he set out in the body of his application notice a memorandum sent to the board of IKOS on 9 December and also his resignation letter of 11 December 2009. There were also a number of allegations (which are denied) about the Claimant's conduct in relation to the business. Obviously, at this stage, it is not possible to come to a final conclusion as to whether Mr Spearman's allegation is well founded.
His suggestion is that the Defendant wanted, for one reason or another, to publish this material and had hitherto refrained from doing so because he believed that he would thereby be in breach of a duty of confidence owed to the company. Another possible consideration was the risk of being sued for libel. On the other hand, once the material entered the public domain, via the route of court proceedings, the Defendant may have been of the opinion that the information would lose its confidential quality and/or that it could be...
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Ambrosiadou v Coward
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