Jarvis Field Press Ltd v Chelton & Others
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | MR JUSTICE PATTEN |
| Judgment Date | 09 October 2003 |
| Neutral Citation | [2003] EWHC 2674 (Ch) |
| Court | Chancery Division |
| Docket Number | 1HC/303/03 |
| Date | 09 October 2003 |
[2003] EWHC 2674 (Ch)
Mr Justice Patten
1HC/303/03
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
CHANCERY DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London WCA 2LL
MR R LORD QC (instructed by Wedlake Bell) appeared on behalf of the CLAIMANT.
MR J RUSSEN (instructed by Eversheds) appeared on behalf of the DEFENDANTS.
This is an application by the claimant in these proceedings, Jarvis Field Press Limited, to continue a freezing order which was granted without notice by Park J on 17 th October last. The learned judge made an order freezing the assets of the first defendant, Mr Chelton, up to a limit of £1.5 million and granted that order over today. He did, however, decline to make the usual form of disclosure order, leaving that to be the subject matter of submissions on the inter partes hearing. The matter came back before Lightman J on 24 th October, but, due to the lack of time, it was impossible to deal with the matter further, with the result that it has been adjourned for me to deal with this afternoon.
The background to the application can be summarised relatively briefly. It is alleged in the Particulars of Claim that were issued in December 2002 that the first defendant, together with the second defendant, Mr Long, made a significant number of unauthorised and unlawful payments out of the assets of the claimant company between 1999 and 2001. The payments which have been identified are set out in the schedule to the Particulars of Claim and total something in excess of £800,000. There is also an allegation that Mrs Chelton procured the grant of a loan to a company called CSM Group Limited, as a result of deception. Most, but not all, of the payments set out in the schedule to the Particulars of Claim were made to a company called Glenwise Limited, which, as I understand it, was a service company of some kind, wholly owned by Mrs Chelton at the relevant time. Throughout the period in question she was a director of the claimant company and was responsible for managing its finances, including the payment of any necessary bills and any other payments.
The evidence put in on behalf of the claimant in the form of two witness statements by Mr Rogers, who now controls the claimant company, is that she operated, together with Mr Long, from a different office from the one in which Jarvis' sales and other functions were carried out, and that she continued throughout the relevant period to do that without any real supervision. When challenged on any occasion or when enquiries were made in relation to various payments, it is said that she continually stressed that she was the person to be concerned with matters of finance and that she could be trusted to ensure that everything was done in an appropriate way. It was subsequently discovered – again all this is the subject matter of allegations in the Particulars of Claim – that the payments I have referred to were made without authority and that the loan (it is said by Mr Rogers) was made on a false basis.
At the same time, Mrs Chelton was also employed by the company CSM Group Limited, which prior to 2001 was the parent company of the claimant, Jarvis Field. In relation to the running of that company, there is also a significant claim now brought (as of October 2003) against Mrs Chelton and others for misfeasance. That claim in relation to CSM Group Limited and other related companies has been quantified in a sum in excess of £14 million.
The allegations set out in the Particulars of Claim and referred to in the evidence, if true, disclose a consistent and determined fraud on the part of Mrs Chelton and those associated with her, whereby significant sums of money were extracted from the claimant company in a devious and secret way, utilising in effect a secret account, with a total absence of disclosure to the board of the claimant company, or indeed to anybody else.
For the purposes of this application, Mr Russen, while strenuously emphasising that the claims are disputed, concedes that on the material before me the claimant has made out a good arguable case in relation to the alleged cause of action. I therefore have to approach this application on the basis that, for freezing order purposes, the claimant has established a case of fraud against the respondent to the application. That is important in the present case, because when the court comes to consider the second key condition for the grant of freezing order relief, namely whether there is a serious risk of dissipation, it has to weigh up, together with the other evidence, whether, on the basis of what it knows about the defendant and her conduct in relation to the matters in issue, it is reasonable to infer that such a risk of dissipation exists. I say that, because this case is unusual in the sense that the alleged fraud, to which I have referred, took place over a period ending almost two years ago, and the proceedings themselves have, as I have already said, been in existence since the end of 2002.
When the proceedings were commenced, a decision was taken not to seek a freezing order of the kind that I am now asked to grant. Mr Rogers, in his first witness statement says that the reason for that was that, notwithstanding Mrs Chelton's apparent dishonesty, it appeared that she had "more than sufficient tangible assets within the jurisdiction to satisfy Jarvis' claim, and it seemed unlikely that she would do anything drastic with her assets because she could afford to pay the claim and still remain reasonably wealthy". He goes on to say that the...
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First Global Bank Ltd v Rohan Rose, Anthony Lewis, Theodore Levy and Mobil Import/Export Company Ltd
...have regard to the particular allegations of dishonesty and to consider them with some care: Jarvis Field Press Ltd v Chelton [2003] EWHC 2674 (Ch) at para 10. 35There is or may be an appreciable risk in the case of somebody who appears to be guilty not merely of dishonesty, but dishonesty......
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...in saying what he did in the Madoff Securities case, the analysis of Patten J (as he then was) in Jarvis Field Press v Chelton [2003] EWHC 2674 (Ch) as to how the Court should approach the Thane Investments case is helpful: “It is necessary to have regard to the particular respondents to t......
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PJSC Tatneft v Gennadiy Bogolyubov and Others
...authorities, the way in which Thane Investments should be read is correctly set out by Patten J in Jarvis Field Press v Chelton [2003] EWHC 2674 (Ch), where having cited the relevant passage from the judgment of Peter Gibson LJ, the learned judge says at [10]: 'The relevance of that passag......
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Clive Roger Wells v Philip Thomas Chave (Defendant and Part 20 Claimant) Clive Roger Wells and Another (Part 20 Defendants)
...in the light of those earlier authorities, the way in which Thane Investments should be read is correctly set out by Patten J in Jarvis Field Press v Chelton [2003] EWHC 2674 (Ch), where having cited the relevant passage from the judgment of Peter Gibson LJ, the learned judge says at [10]: ......