appeal about security for costs.
Held: Where a foreign company is reticent in revealing, or declines to reveal its financial position, it is ‘sound’ practice to grant security against it: ‘ If a company is given every opportunity to show that it can pay a defendant’s costs and deliberately refuses to do so there is, in our view, every reason to believe that, if and when it is required to pay a defendant’s costs, it will be unable to do so . . even if deliberate reticence on the part of a respondent is not a breach of CPR 1.3, a court can and should take account of deliberate reticence as part of the overall picture. Any evaluation has to be made on the totality of the evidence before the court; part of that totality is the absence of relevant evidence from the only party who is able to provide it. If, therefore, there were to be a practice of the Commercial Court (as to which we cannot express a view from our own experience) that security for costs will often be granted against a foreign company who is not obliged to publish accounts, has no discernible assets and declines to reveal anything about its financial position, our view is that the practice is a sound one’
Longmore, Sales, LJJ, Baker J
[2016] EWCA Civ 120, [2016] 2 Costs LO 227
Bailii
Civil Procedure Rules 1.3
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Tulip Trading Ltd v Bitcoin Association for BSV and Others ChD 5-Jan-2022
Security required for Bitcoin claim
Two applications for security for costs. The claimant claimed against fifteen overseas residents requiring a re-write of cryotocurrency systems so that he could recover sums he said were due to him in respect of Bitcoin assets which he said have . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Costs
Updated: 17 January 2022; Ref: scu.560619