The Supreme Court has upheld the Court of Appeal’s decision to strike out a claim brought by the liquidators of a Ponzi scheme against its correspondent bank, alleging that the bank breached its so-called Quincecare duty to take sufficient care that monies paid out from the accounts under its control were being paid out properly: … Read more

There has been no shortage of high-profile insolvencies in the crypto market in recent months across a range of market participants and geographies. These include the US Chapter 11 and Bahamas provisional liquidation of FTX as well as the US Chapter 11 filings of BlockFi, Singapore-based crypto hedge fund ThreeArrows Capital, US-based lender Celsius Network, … Read more

Despite numerous warnings from the FCA that “firms shouldn’t be relying on…a “synthetic” US dollar LIBOR as we have given for sterling and yen” (see speech by the FCA’s Edwin Schooling Latter on 8 December 2021), last week the regulator confirmed that it would allow market participants to do just that. In this blog post, … Read more

The Court of Appeal has allowed an appeal in a case which provides important clarification around the scope and construction of contractual provisions obliging the parties to act in good faith: Re Compound Photonics Group Ltd; Faulkner v Vollin Holdings Ltd [2022] EWCA Civ 1371. Although set in a non-financial context, the decision will be of … Read more

The Court of Appeal has upheld a decision of the High Court to strike out a claim by the former shareholders of a dissolved company against an investor on the basis that all the losses claimed were barred by the reflective loss principle: Burnford & Ors v Automobile Association Developments Ltd [2022] EWCA Civ 1943. … Read more

The Court of Appeal has held that the identity of those instructing lawyers on behalf of a corporate client are not generally protected by litigation privilege: Loreley Financing (Jersey) No 30 Ltd v Credit Suisse Securities (Europe) [2022] EWCA Civ 1484. The court rejected the notion that litigation privilege protects all information falling within a “zone of … Read more

The High Court has summarily determined that a bank’s default notice of an event of default to an energy company, for failure to pay monies due under a foreign exchange (FX) swap, was valid under the terms of the 2002 ISDA Master Agreement governing the transaction: Macquarie Bank Limited v Phelan Energy Group Limited [2022] … Read more