Simon Salzedo KC (sitting as a Judge of the High Court) has today handed down judgment in the Commercial Court in Global Steel Holdings Limited v Prasan (PTC) Limited, dismissing the Claimant’s application for summary judgment. 4 New Square Chambers’ Stephen Ryan acted for the successful respondent in defeating a summary judgment application raising allegations of dishonesty.
The decision concerns important points of principle about the limits of the court’s ability to determine summarily issues of fact which involve questions of dishonesty, and to reject written witness evidence that has not been tested in cross-examination. It also concerns the correct approach to the second limb of the test under CPR Part 24 (no other compelling reason why the case or issue should be disposed of at trial), where a trial on related issues is required in any event.
The Claimant (GSHL) was the holding company for a number of subsidiaries involved in the steel industry globally but is now in liquidation in the Isle of Man. The liquidators have brought a claim against the company’s own ultimate shareholder (Prasan), a BVI private trust company who is the trustee of a trust whose beneficiaries include members of the family of Mr Pramod Mittal.
The case concerns whether the parties entered into an Assignment Agreement by which sums owing to the Claimant by the Defendant under a loan agreement were, the Defendant says, discharged and extinguished by means of a legal assignment of part of a separate debt owing to the Defendant by a related party. The Claimant contends that the Assignment Agreement was not entered into in 2010, or at all, but rather was manufactured for the purposes of the proceedings, relying on expert evidence to the effect that the metadata of the PDF put forward by the Defendant had been interfered with to make it appear to have been created in 2010, whereas it had been created in 2023. The Defendant relied, in opposition to the summary judgment application, solely on the written evidence of Mr Singh, whose signature appears on the Assignment Agreement, to the effect that he signed the agreement in 2010.
The Judge found that despite the unchallenged expert evidence as to the interference with the metadata of the PDF, Mr Singh’s evidence was not “manifestly incredible”, nor was it contradicted by all the documents or other material on which it is based, and that accordingly the Court was obliged to conclude that such evidence shows that the Defendant has a real prospect of showing that the Assignment Agreement existed.
The Judge also found that an additional reason to refuse to grant summary judgment was that a short trial was fixed to take place in the near future, at which related issues would be determined in any event. Those factors, taken together, amounted to a compelling reason why the principal claim should be disposed of at a trial.
4 New Square Chambers’ Stephen Ryan was instructed by Collyer Bristow LLP to act on behalf of the Defendant.
