Jsc Bta Bank (Claiamant) v Roman Solodchenko and Others Paul Kythreotis and Others
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | MR JUSTICE HENDERSON |
| Judgment Date | 23 May 2011 |
| Neutral Citation | [2011] EWHC 1687 (Ch) |
| Date | 23 May 2011 |
| Court | Chancery Division |
| Docket Number | Case No: HC10C02462 |
[2011] EWHC 1687 (Ch)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
CHANCERY DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London WC2A 2LL
Mr Justice Henderson
Case No: HC10C02462
MR TIM AKKOUH (instructed by Hogan Lovells International LLP) appeared on behalf of the Claimants Person
Defendants not in attendance
Approved Judgment
I have a procedural issue to deal with, which is not entirely straightforward. Simply stated, the question is whether notice of the current application should be given to Mr Ablyazov before I make any order. The background, in brief, is that on 12 th May the Claimant made an application without notice to myself, seeking permission to use various documents, which had been disclosed under compulsion, for the purposes of proposed committal proceedings to be brought in the Commercial Court in the Drey proceedings against Mr Ablyazov. The named Respondents to that application were Mr Kythreotis, the Second Defendant in the Chancery AAA action, together with Eastbridge Capital Limited, Park Hill Capital Limited, Mr Ereshchenko and Mr Salim Shalabayev. The reason they were joined as Respondents that they were the parties who had disclosed the documents that the Claimant sought permission to use.
At the hearing I was not satisfied that it was appropriate to proceed without notice against those Respondents, given what seemed to me the unconvincing evidence of urgency which had been placed before the court, and the distinction between that application and the earlier ones, which had been made in preparation for the widening of the already very extensive receivership orders made against Mr Ablyazov in the Commercial Court.
I also raised the question whether notice of the application should be given to Mr Ablyazov, on the footing that he was the person against whom the proposed contempt proceedings were to be brought, and as such it seemed to me at least arguable he had an interest in the matter and should have a right to be heard before the court ruled on the application. I referred Mr Akkouh to observations made by the Court of Appeal in the Dadourian case, Dadouran v. Simms (No. 2) [2006] Civ 1745, [2007] 1WLR 2967, which appeared to provide some support for that view of the matter. But on examining it, and with the help of his submissions, it did seem to me that that case could properly be distinguished on the footing that the Defendant there, whom the Court of Appeal said should be joined to the application, was the person who had disclosed the relevant documents as well as being the object of the proposed contempt proceedings. The present case was therefore distinguishable, because Mr Ablyazov himself had not, at least directly, disclosed the relevant documents.
There was, however, a possible further wrinkle, as Mr Akkouh termed it, in that it might emerge in due course that Mr Ablyazov is the ultimate beneficial owner of some at least of the documents which were disclosed, or disclosure of which was obtained from Mr Shalabayer's laptop. Nevertheless, taking everything into consideration it seemed to me, at that point, that there was no need for Mr Ablyazov to be made a party, and I therefore granted limited permission for the documents to be used for the purposes only of issuing the relevant contempt...
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