Fraud & Asset Recovery

Recent cases include:

• Acting for the former majority shareholders of Yukos on their enforcement action in England in relation to US$50+ billion arbitration awards against the Russian state. This is to our knowledge the largest claim to recover assets in global legal history. We have recently successfully defeated the sovereign state’s claim to state immunity: we are the first lawyers to have done so outside of the seat of the arbitration.
• Acting for the victims of a cross border ponzi scheme where monies had been transferred abroad, successfully making recoveries in less than 12 months by focussing on a strategy aimed at asset recovery from the outset. The civil proceedings led to a recovery for victims before parallel criminal proceedings even reached trial.
• Acting for the administrator of an insolvent CEE bank in fraud proceedings against the bank's former owner, a Russian businessman. Successfully obtained freezing orders, search orders and succeeded at trial with a US$70+ million judgment for our client.
• Advising a global company facing US$ 1 billion+ fraud involving covert business arrangements and complex transactions across opaque jurisdictions.
• Coordinating global litigation for a European client arising from the Bernard Madoff fraud, the largest Ponzi scheme in history.
• Representing Cayman liquidators of two failed funds linked to widely publicised fraud allegations against their investment manager. Initially retained on fraud and arbitration enforcement issues, we now advise on English law questions arising in the liquidations. Our work includes strategies to recover and realise a multi‑million‑pound art portfolio for creditors, information‑gathering rights under English law, and enforcement routes.

Recent cases include:

• Representing a large commodities trader in a landmark metals sector fraud against multiple companies concerning purported nickel trades. In 2023, we secured a proprietary worldwide freezing order in England, with matching relief in Cayman, Singapore and Malaysia, and later defeated an application to discharge it.
• Acting for insolvency practitioners appointed over four connected insolvent estates in relation to asset tracing and recovery actions to secure assets salted away through a large-scale and sophisticated investment fraud. The fraud was perpetrated by a businessman who lured in many investors, and who then misappropriated those investment funds using various means, including sham loans.
• Acting for a sovereign state in investigating a fraud on a state owned company, and devising an asset recovery strategy to recoup misappropriated funds.
• Acting for a commodities trader to freeze and secure oil that was subject to multi-party claims arising from the insolvency of a major Russian oil refinery, successfully ensuring that monies were paid into the English Court as a condition of another party being able to take control of the oil cargo.
• Advising a US special‑purpose fund that believed it made legitimate commodities investments but appears instead to have fallen victim to a Ponzi scheme or theft.
• Advising clients on a global asset recovery strategy in support of an arbitration against a sovereign state.