Red River UK Ltd. & Anor. v Sheikh & Anor.

Applications made during ongoing litigation should generally be dealt with efficiently and on the evidence available at the hearing. The court may appoint an assessor under Civil Procedure Rules 1998, CPR 35.15, but that is an unusual course and is inappropriate where the issues are ordinary conveyancing, construction or procedural questions within the Chancery Division judge’s competence. Allegations, proposed evidence or requests for inspection will not justify delaying judgment unless they are shown to bear materially on the issues to be decided. Parties should prepare their evidence and submissions before applying and should avoid serial applications that burden the court and opposing parties. The court may also warn that continued excessive applications could lead to a civil restraint order.

During pending Chancery Division litigation, the court heard a series of applications by Miss Sheikh concerning the conduct and timing of proceedings, including a request for a court-appointed assessor, requests to delay judgment, inspection of the court file, production of further material, and permission to file further written submissions.

The applications arose against the background of earlier orders, winding-up petitions and a forthcoming hearing of other outstanding matters. Miss Sheikh also referred to a pending application concerning documents held for a possible remortgage and to an earlier judgment of Briggs J. The central issues were whether the court should obtain specialist assistance or postpone judgment until further documents, applications or submissions became available.

1. Assessor. The application for appointment of an assessor under CPR 35.15 was dismissed. The matters identified were ordinary conveyancing, construction and procedural questions within the competence of a Chancery Division judge. Appointment would cause delay, expense and inconvenience and was an unusual step in ordinary litigation. The applicant’s experience as a solicitor and the assistance of opposing counsel further reduced any justification based on inequality of arms.
2. Requests to postpone judgment. The court refused to postpone judgment until an earlier application concerning delivery up of Land Registry documents had been determined. That issue could be dealt with at the hearing already fixed and was not materially necessary to decide whether permission should be given for a fresh winding-up petition. The court did, however, intend to consider the approved transcript of Briggs J.’s earlier judgment before giving judgment, if it became available as expected.
3. The court refused to hear separately, before judgment, an application challenging numerous earlier orders. The alleged withholding of pages from key documents was unsupported by solid evidence and appeared inherently improbable. The court would take the submissions into account when addressing the application in due course.
4. The court declined to await a proposed file containing allegations of accounting, fiscal and money-laundering abuses because its relevance had not been shown. A party should have evidence ready when making an application and cannot ordinarily require a staged process for personal convenience.
5. Permission to inspect the court file and permission to file further written submissions were also refused at this stage. The suspicions concerning missing documents were speculative, and the applicant had already had ample opportunity to present written and oral arguments. The court warned that continued serial applications might lead to consideration of a civil restraint order.

The judgment concerns first-instance case-management and interlocutory applications. It states that permission to appeal earlier orders was pending, but gives no appellate decision concerning the present applications.