Re Howglen Ltd
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 23 February 2000 |
| Date | 23 February 2000 |
| Court | Chancery Division |
CHANCERY DIVISION
Before Mr Justice Pumfrey
Practice - application for disclosure of documents by non-party - satisfying court that documents fall within rule
On an application for an order that a non-party disclose all documents within a particular class, the court had to be satisfied that every document falling within that class satisfied the requirements of rule 31.17 of the Civil Procedure Rules.
Mr Justice Pumfrey so held in the Chancery Division, allowing in part the application of HSBC Bank plc to set aside or vary an order made by Mr Registrar Rawson in the course of Company Directors (Disqualification) Act 1986 proceedings commenced by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry against Christopher Paul Reynard, the sole director of Howglen Ltd, on the application of Mr Reynard, pursuant to the Bankers Books (Evidence) Act 1879, for an order for the production of certain classes of documents, namely:
(i) all notes of interviews between the branch manager of the bank and Mr Reynard concerning the bank account of the company and/or its conduct between January 1, 1995 and January 18, 1996, when the company ceased to trade;
(ii) all internal memoranda kept by or made by the branch manager during that same period;
(iii) all notes kept by the manager of conversations between himself and Cooper & Lybrand, accountants, relating to the affairs of the company from September 1, 1996 to January 14, 1998, the commencement of disqualification proceedings;
(iv) the like entries made by a Mr Bob Dawe, the company's branch manager from early 1995 onwards, as in (i) to (iii) above held at the bank's central lending services office; and
(v) the like entries and records kept at central lending services by any of the officials of the bank there during the relevant period.
Mr Nigel Dougherty for HSBC; Mr Ian McCulloch and Miss Caroline Bolton for Mr Reynard.
MR JUSTICE PUMFREY said that the order made by the registrar could not properly have been made under the 1879 Act as the documents sought clearly fell outside the ambit of the "other records used in the ordinary business of the bank" forming part of the banker's book for the purposes of section 9(2) of the Act: see R v DadsonUNK ((1983) 77 Cr App R 91, 93) and Williams v WilliamsELR ((1988) 1 QB 161).
Since the bank was willing to produce documents which...
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