Propend Finance Pty Ltd and Others v Sing and Another
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 17 April 1997 |
| Date | 17 April 1997 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
Court of Appeal
Before Lord Justice Leggatt, Lord Justice Pill and Mr Justice Mance
State immunity - diplomatic immunity - breach of undertaking
A police officer in the Australian Federal Police Force, an accredited diplomat in the Australian High Commission, who took possession of documents relating to an Australian company held by London solicitors and accountants, and seized by the Metropolitan Police pursuant to a direction of the Home Secretary in response to a request by the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth of Australia and under warrants, did not waive his diplomatic immunity when he allegedly breached undertakings given to a High Court judge not to remove the documents from the court's jurisdiction for seven days.
In any event the actions of the police officer and, if he was vicariously liable, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, were entitled to state immunity from the jurisdiction of the courts of the United Kingdom.
The Court of Appeal so held in a reserved judgment when it dismissed the appeal of the plaintiffs, Propend Finance Pty Ltd, Richard Scheinberg Holdings Pty Ltd, Chusan Nominees Pty Ltd, Ginges Holdings Pty Ltd, Evenstyle Pty Ltd, Barney Richard Scheinberg, Albert Scheinberg, Bererl Ginges, Michael Dunkel and Michael Dunkel & Co, but allowed the appeal of the second defendant, the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), against the order of Mr Justice Laws dated March 14, 1996, that proceedings for contempt of court could not proceed against the first defendant, Detective Superintendent Alan Sing, an officer of the AFP and serving as First Secretary (Police Liaison) at the Australian High Commission between December 1989 and shortly after December 1993, but could proceed against the second defendant.
Mr Nigel Pleming, QC and Mr James Lewis for the plaintiffs; Mr Gordon Pollock, QC and Mr David Mayhew, solicitor, for the defendants.
LORD JUSTICE LEGGATT, giving the judgment of the court, said that in August 1993 the Attorney-General of Australia sought assistance from the United Kingdom government, pursuant to the Scheme relating to Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters within the Commonwealth, adopted at the meeting of Commonwealth Law Ministers held in Harare, Zimbabwe, 1986 (Comm Law Bulletin, October 1986), to obtain a court order for search warrants in respect of documents and information relating to an investigation into alleged tax evasion in Australia.
In September the Home Secretary issued a...
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Jones v Ministry of the Interior of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and another (Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and another intervening); Mitchell v Al-Dali;
...is apt to cater for the limitations of subject-matter or functional immunity (cf. paras. 23–4 above). In Propend Finance Pty Ltd v. Sing 111 ILR 611, 669 the court held that the effect of section 14(1) was to give state officials protection ‘under the same cloak’ as the state itself: The co......
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Re P (Children Act: Diplomatic Immunity) (No 1)
... ... precisely with that expressed by Laws J in Propend Finance v SingINTLUNK[3] (unreported) 17 April 1997, in ... ...
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R (Saifi) v Governor of Brixton Prison
... ... there was a discussion involving the applicant and others to the effect that Gulsham Kumar was troubling the ... been deceitfully induced to change his lawyer to another chosen by the police, to have been promised bail if he ... prosecutions including the police: he referred to Propend Finance Ltd v Singh [1998] International Law Reports 611 ... ...
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Al-Malki and Another v Reyes
...in a professional or commercial business. This is what Laws J decided in the only English case on article 31(1) until this one: Propend Finance Pty Ltd v Sing (1997) 111 ILR 611, 635–636 (the point did not arise in the Court of Appeal). I think that he was right. (4) As I shall demonstrate ......
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The Weekly Roundup: The Establishing Jurisdiction Edition
...section 5. Perhaps most boldly, the Judge batted away comments of Laws J (as he then was) in the case of Propend Finance Pty Ltd v Sing (1997) 111 ILR 611 who had obiter considered this exact issue and come down on the other side. Despite referring to him as 'one of the 20th century's great......