Suez Fortune Investments Ltd and Another v Talbot Underwriting Ltd and Others
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | The Hon. Mr Justice Flaux |
| Judgment Date | 10 May 2016 |
| Neutral Citation | [2016] EWHC 1085 (Comm) |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Commercial Court) |
| Date | 10 May 2016 |
| Docket Number | Case No: 2012 FOLIO 198 |
[2016] EWHC 1085 (Comm)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
COMMERCIAL COURT
Rolls Building
7 Rolls Building
Fetter Lane
London, EC4A 1NL
The Honourable Mr Justice Flaux
Case No: 2012 FOLIO 198
Ms Claire Blanchard QC & Mr Tim Jenns (instructed by Hill Dickinson) for the First Claimant
Mr Jonathan Gaisman QC, Mr Stephen Kenny QC and Ms Nichola Warrender (instructed by Norton Rose Fulbright) for the Defendants
Hearing dates: Monday 11 th April, Tuesday 12 th April and Friday 15 th April 2016
Approved Judgment
I direct that pursuant to CPR PD 39A para 6.1 no official shorthand note shall be taken of this Judgment and that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic.
Introduction
Paragraph 1 of my Order of 12 January 2016 obliged the first claimants ("the owners") to deliver up a complete and unredacted copy of the Worldwide Green Tankers Ltd ("WWGT") electronic archive to their London Solicitors Hill Dickinson or to the second claimants' London Solicitors, Clyde & Co, within 7 days, failing which their claim would be struck out. The owners failed to comply with that obligation and the claim was struck out. Just before the expiry of the seven day period, on 19 January 2016, the owners issued an application notice seeking: (i) an extension of time for compliance with paragraph 1 of that Order; and (ii) pursuant to CPR 3.9 relief from the sanction imposed by paragraph 1 of that Order for failure to deliver up the WWGT electronic archive to Hill Dickinson or Clyde & Co. Although that application notice was not accompanied by witness evidence in support, by my ruling on 26 January 2016, I held that to the extent that it notified an application for an extension of time, that application was made in time, and was therefore subject to the general provisions of CPR 3.1 rather than the stricter relief from sanctions regime of CPR 3.9. I granted what was in effect a final extension of time until 4.30 pm on 2 February 2016 for the service of any evidence in support of that application notice.
That application was heard by me on 11, 12 and 15 April 2016. Immediately prior to the hearing, on 8 April 2016, the owners amended their application notice so as to seek an extension of time to a date to be determined by the Court and also to include an application pursuant to CPR 3.1(7), for a variation of the Order of 12 January 2016 to substitute for the obligation to deliver up the electronic archive an obligation on the owners to use their best endeavours to obtain the electronic archive and hand it over to Hill Dickinson or Clyde & Co. This is the judgment in relation to the applications made by the owners.
Background
The owners' motor tanker BRILLANTE VIRTUOSO ("the vessel") suffered an explosion in the vicinity of her engine room whilst waiting off Aden on 5 July 2011. The owners' case is that the vessel was boarded by pirates who, when the vessel's engine, which had stopped, could not be restarted, detonated an explosive device in the purifier room. Following salvage efforts, the vessel was eventually sold for scrap. The owners made a claim against the defendant war risk underwriters ("the insurers") on the basis that the vessel was a constructive total loss. That claim was resisted and, on 8 February 2012, proceedings in the Commercial Court were commenced by the owners and the second claimants, the bank who were the mortgagees of the vessel.
Somewhat unusually, the parties agreed that the issue of quantum of the claim should be tried before liability and, accordingly, on 8 November 2013, I made an Order for a split trial, with the issues of quantum (and specifically whether the vessel was a constructive total loss) to be tried first. That trial took place before me over eleven days in November and December 2014 and, by my judgment dated 15 January 2015, I held that the vessel was a constructive total loss. That left for determination at a subsequent trial issues of liability. At that stage, insurers' primary defence was that the claimants were not entitled to cover under the policy because, by delaying transit through the Gulf of Aden and/or calling at a port or place within the Gulf, the owners were in breach of the Talbot Gulf of Aden warranty which provided: " When transiting, vessels/craft shall not call at any port or place or delay their passage in the transfer of cargo, stores, personnel or the like" and/or the owners were in breach of warranty by failing to apply Best Management Practices to Deter Piracy. The insurers also put the claimants to proof of the occurrence of an insured peril.
Some seven weeks after that judgment was handed down, on 6 March 2015, the insurers' solicitors, Norton Rose Fulbright, served on the claimants' respective solicitors, Hill Dickinson and Clyde & Co, a draft Re-Amended Defence and Counterclaim alleging that the vessel had been lost as a result of wilful misconduct on the part of the owners. The owners were invited to consent to that amendment but did not do so and, following a contested hearing on 1 May 2015, I gave permission to the insurers to make that amendment. At the same hearing on 1 May 2015, I made a Consent Order for disclosure in relation to Stage 2 of the case (i.e. issues of liability) which included an Order for Peruvian Guano disclosure and for specific disclosure of certain categories of documents, including documents held by or previously held by WWGT, the managers of the vessel and by Mr Marios Iliopoulos (the ultimate beneficial owner of the vessel and of other vessels managed by WWGT and the person who, according to an Affidavit he had sworn on 24 October 2014 in the context of Stage 1 of the proceedings, held shares in WWGT). That part of the Order covered a number of other individuals known to be WWGT personnel and included documents held within 14 specified WWGT email accounts. Those individuals included both Mr Iliopoulos and Mr Sayed Agha. The Order clearly extended beyond documents in relation to the vessel itself. To the extent that relevant documentation was in electronic form, inspection was to be given by production in native format. As has emerged since that Order was made, the documents formerly held in electronic form on WWGT's computer systems were transferred onto a USB flashdrive (to which I will refer as "the WWGT archive") when WWGT ceased trading at the end of 2014. It was to that WWGT archive that paragraph 1 of my Order of 12 January 2016 related.
Disclosure Lists were originally ordered to be served on 31 July 2015, but by mid-July 2015, no additional documents had yet been provided by the owners to Hill Dickinson for the purposes of giving disclosure for Stage 2. The owners made an application for an extension of time and on 23 July 2015 I extended the 31 July deadline (save for disclosure of documents already held by the solicitors) to 14 August 2015. There was a failure by the owners to comply with the 1 May 2015 Order by that extended deadline, specifically as regards the WWGT archive. On 14 September 2015, Hill Dickinson issued an application for a further extension of time, initially until 23 September 2015, although this was soon accepted as unrealistic.
The matter came before me for hearing on 28 September 2015. Such was the position in relation to the owners' failure to comply with their disclosure obligations that the trial date for the Stage 2 trial which had been fixed for April 2016 was adjourned by consent following the issue by the insurers of an application notice seeking such an adjournment. In the evidence filed by Hill Dickinson for that hearing it emerged that four days after the deadline of 14 August 2015, in circumstances which, as I held in my ruling on 28 September 2015 were wholly unexplained, the owners literally dumped on their own solicitors documentation comprising the equivalent of 280 lever arch files derived from the WWGT archive. However, as the evidence in the 11 th witness statement of Mr Rhys Clift (the partner at Hill Dickinson in charge of the case on behalf of the owners) signed on 18 September 2015 revealed, the disclosure from the WWGT archive given to Hill Dickinson was limited to documents "in respect of the vessel covering the period from 1 st October 2010 until 15 th March 2012". This limitation to the vessel and to a particular period of time was not justified by the Order of 1 May 2015. Accordingly, at the hearing on 28 September 2015, I made a further Order that by 30 October 2015:
"The claimants are to disclose all further documents within the custody or possession of Suez Fortune and/or Worldwide Green Tankers and/or Mr Marios Iliopoulos which fall within standard disclosure, as ordered in paragraph 7 of the Directions Order and/or are responsive to the First and/or Second Disclosure Orders and/or paragraphs 2 and/or 3 above…"
In correspondence following that hearing, it emerged that the owners had not provided Hill Dickinson with a complete copy of the WWGT archive, so that Hill Dickinson could comply with their own obligations as solicitors to the Court to satisfy themselves that full and proper disclosure had been given. Indeed at that stage, the owners had carried out their own sift of the archive using only two search terms unilaterally chosen by them, "Brillante" and "@piraeusbank" and only documentation responsive to those searches had been provided to Hill Dickinson.
On 30 October 2015, the deadline for disclosure of the...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Suez Fortune Investments Ltd v Talbot Underwriting Ltd
...with an electronic archive of documents and had lied to the court in an attempt to prevent the claim from being struck out; see [2016] EWHC 1085 (Comm). 19 Thus the claim is now continued by the Bank. However, the Bank also had a mortgagee interest insurance policy and the underwriters of ......
-
Philip John Eaglesham v Ministry of Defence
...with an Unless Order. 6 As Flaux J said in another case involving non-compliance with an Unless Order, Suez Fortune Investments Ltd and others v Talbot Underwriting Ltd and others [2016] EWHC 1085 (Comm) at [50] the necessary underlying assumption in Denton v White is that relief may be gra......
-
William Thompson v Fredericka Thompson
...case involving non-compliance with an Unless Order, Suez Fortune Investments Ltd and others v Talbot Underwriting Ltd. and others [2016] EWHC 1085 (Comm) at [50] the underlying assumption in Denton v White is that relief may be granted if either (i) the relevant default has been cured (in ......
-
Cobussen Principal Investment Holdings Ltd v Ghouse Akbar
...he has not disclosed it. This cannot be right. vii) In reliance on Suez Fortune Investments Limited v. Talbot Underwriting Limited [2016] EWHC 1085 (Comm) [11] Mr. Weale submits that DWF should have played a far more active role in searching the documents held and produced by Mr. Akbar. Th......
-
Scuttling: The Innocent Co-assured's (uninsured) Peril - "The Brillante Virtuoso"
...see [2015] EWHC 42 (Comm). Owners' claim was struck out for failing to disclose documents and relief for sanctions was refused: see [2016] EWHC 1085 (Comm). Only the bank's claim and insurers' counterclaim for declaration of non-liability proceeded to After a detailed factual enquiry into t......