The Commercial Court has granted summary judgment in favour of a bank seeking to recover payments under Credit Agreements entered into with the Venezuelan state-owned oil and gas company, Petroleos De Venezuela SA (PDVSA), finding that the defaulting borrower had no real prospect of successfully defending the claims on the basis of certain US Sanctions … Read more

In a decision earlier this year, the Commercial Court considered the impact of a force majeure clause on a repayment obligation in a contract for the sale of goods: Totsa Total Oil Trading SA v New Stream Trading AG [2020] EWHC 855 (Comm). (The judgment was given in March 2020 but the transcript has only … Read more

The Commercial Court has granted declaratory relief concerning a bank’s rights under an interest rate hedging arrangement governed by the 1992 ISDA Master Agreement: BNP Paribas SA v Trattamento Rifiuti Metropolitani SPA [2020] EWHC 2436 (Comm). This is the substantive English trial judgment in the long-running (and cross-jurisdictional) dispute between BNP Paribas S.A. (the Bank) … Read more

The Court of Appeal has upheld the High Court’s decision on a claim involving the legal meaning of ‘goodwill’ and the contractual construction of an exclusion clause excluding liability for lost goodwill: Primus International Holding Co & Ors v Triumph Controls – UK Ltd & Anor [2020] EWCA Civ 1228. In doing so, the Court … Read more

The High Court’s judgment in Gareth Hamblin and Marilyn Hamblin v World First Limited and Moorwand NL Limited [2020] EWHC 2383 (Comm) is the first decision to follow the Supreme Court’s ruling in Singularis Holdings Ltd v Daiwa Capital Markets [2019] UKSC 50, considering the so-called Quincecare duty of care (see our banking litigation blog … Read more

The trend of claims against financial institutions alleging breach of the so-called Quincecare duty continues to grow, with the most recent judgment from the High Court refusing to strike out such a claim on the ground that the claimant had suffered no loss because it was an insolvent Ponzi scheme. A parallel claim against the … Read more

The High Court has today handed down judgment in the COVID-19 Business Interruption insurance test case of The Financial Conduct Authority v Arch and Others. Herbert Smith Freehills represented the FCA (who was advancing the claim for policyholders) in the case, which considered 21 lead sample wordings from eight insurers. Following expedited proceedings, the judgment brings … Read more

In a recent decision, the High Court confirmed that proceedings had been properly served on a borrower where it had failed to comply with its contractual obligations to appoint a process agent and so the lender had appointed an agent on its behalf as permitted by the credit agreement: Banco San Juan Internacional Inc v … Read more