The court considered the principles to be applied on injunction applications within proprietary claims.
Held: Millett LJ explained the difference between a proprietary injunction and a Mareva freezing injunction: ‘The courts have always recognised a clear distinction between the ordinary Mareva jurisdiction and proprietary claims. The ordinary Mareva injunction restricts a defendant from dealing with his own assets. An injunction of the present kind, at least in part, restrains the defendants from dealing with assets to which the plaintiff asserts title. It is not designed merely to preserve the defendant’s assets so as to be available to meet a judgment; it is designed to protect the plaintiff from having its property expended for the defendant’s purposes’.
And ‘A trustee has no right to have recourse to trust money to defend himself against a claim for breach of trust unless he has an arguable case for saying that he has a beneficial interest in the funds in question. No man has a right to use somebody else’s money for the purpose of defending himself against legal proceedings. Just as the Court’s jurisdiction to grant the injunction in the first place depended on the plaintiff’s establishing an arguable case that the money belonged to it, so its willingness to permit the defendant to have re-course to the money depends upon his establishing an arguable claim to the money . . ‘
Millett LJ
[1997] EWCA Civ 2953, [1997] Lexis Citation 5078
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Director of Assets Recovery Agency v Creaven and Others QBD 8-Nov-2005
The defendant had been acquitted of criminal charges and had an order for costs made in his favour. The claimant pursued a civil recovery order. The defendant sought a variation of the interim order.
Held: When considering such an application, . .
Cited – Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp and Others v Harris and Others ChD 5-Feb-2013
The court was asked whether a copyright owner has a proprietary claim to money derived from infringement of the copyright.
Held: He did not. No such argument could be shown to have suceeded before. . .
Cited – Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp and Others v Harris and Others ChD 5-Feb-2013
The court was asked whether a copyright owner has a proprietary claim to money derived from infringement of the copyright.
Held: He did not. No such argument could be shown to have suceeded before. . .
Cited – XX and Others v YY and Others ChD 2-Jul-2021
The first defendant applies for an order that the claimants are not entitled to pursue legal action against his lawyers in respect of funds over which the claimants claim a proprietary interest and paid to the first defendant’s lawyers as legal fees . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Updated: 30 October 2021; Ref: scu.143352