International Credit and Investment Company (Overseas) Ltd and Another v Adham and Others
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 22 January 1997 |
| Date | 22 January 1997 |
| Court | Chancery Division |
Chancery Division
Before Mr Justice Harman
Practice - ordering solicitor to disclose clients - exceptional circumstances
The court's inherent power to order a solicitor to disclose the name and address of his client should be exercised only in exceptional cases but the power was not confined to cases where the disclosure was necessary to make the process of the court effectual.
The jurisdiction could also be used to prevent defendants in complicated international frauds from, in effect, defeating the jurisdiction of the court through shadowy offshore trusts and companies which were designed to make their assets "judgment-proof".
Mr Justice Harman so held in the Chancery Division when granting disclosure on an application by International Credit and Investment Co (Overseas) Ltd and Finance and Investment International Ltd, the plaintiffs, on a motion against Ross Williams, Hitchin, who had appeared as solicitors for the trustees of the Gadsden trust.
Mr Ewan McQuater for the plaintiff applicants; Mr Timothy W E Evans for the solicitors.
MR JUSTICE HARMAN said that the motion was, on the face of it, a most unusual one which sought an order that solicitors disclose the name and addresses of the client by whom they were instructed for the purposes of a hearing before Mr Justice Robert Walker on November 20, 1996.
The history of the matter was that on November 17, a Sunday, on an ex parte application by counsel, Mr Justice Robert Walker had made an order appointing a receiver over all the assets within the court's jurisdiction of the tenth defendant, Mr Laith Pharaon, who had been restrained from dealing with or disposing of those assets by orders of the court made in May and August 1996.
The receivership was also in respect of all the assets of the fifth defendant, Mr Ghaith Pharaon, the tenth defendant's father. Orders against him restraining him from dealing with assets worldwide went back to November 1992. Further restraints existed upon the assets of the sixth defendant, Pharaoh Holdings Ltd.
The order expressly extended to the assets which were or formerly had been assets of a Liechtenstein trust whose trustees had included Mr Laith Pharaon, Mary Kalliazis Pharaon and a named company; the assets of Ghaith International SA, a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands which was not a defendant to the action; and property...
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