CHIA-HSING WANG v FLOREAT PRIVATE LIMITED

Where an interim injunction is refused on discretionary grounds, rather than because the underlying claim is ill-founded, the appropriate order will ordinarily be to reserve costs to the trial judge. The trial judge is better placed to assess whether the claimant ultimately establishes the right supporting the injunction.

Permission to appeal requires a real, rather than fanciful, prospect of success. An appellate court is unlikely to interfere with a discretionary decision or a properly supported factual conclusion. Difficulties arising in foreign proceedings should ordinarily be addressed by the foreign court or tribunal, consistently with comity.

This was a consequential judgment following the dismissal of the claimant’s application for an interim injunction pending trial in England. The court had previously concluded that, whether or not the claimant’s asserted right existed, interim relief was inappropriate and had indicated that the defendants should give certain undertakings.

The court determined entitlement to costs and the claimant’s application for permission to appeal. The central issues were whether costs should follow the defendants’ success on the interim application or be reserved, and whether the proposed grounds of appeal had a real prospect of success.

1. Costs. The court held that costs should be reserved to the judge hearing the substantive trial. The claimant’s application had not been rejected as ill-founded; the court had decided only that there was no good ground for granting interim relief. The trial judge would therefore be better placed to determine whether the claimant had established a right to an injunction in the longer term (paras 8–9).
2. The court treated the approach in Melford Capital Partners Ltd v Wingfield Digby, [2021] 1 WLR 1553, and the rule emerging from Desquenne, [2001] FSR 1, as supporting reservation of costs where the underlying dispute cannot properly be determined at the interim stage. It was unnecessary to determine the quantum of costs, and the court would not have assessed substantial costs summarily after a two-day hearing (paras 6–9).
3. Permission to appeal. The applicable test, agreed by the parties, was whether the claimant had a real, as opposed to fanciful, prospect of success in overturning the decision (para 11).
4. The proposed appeal had no real prospect of success. The refusal of relief involved an exercise of discretion, the factual basis for concluding that intervention would interfere with other proceedings was sufficient, and subsequent events did not provide evidence that comity would have been better served by intervention. Any difficulties in the foreign proceedings were matters for the foreign court or tribunal. The court rejected the alleged confusion between supervisory and original jurisdiction; it had exercised its jurisdiction to grant or refuse an interim injunction in support of an asserted right (paras 12–14).

This was a first-instance consequential judgment following the court’s earlier judgment of 13 February 2023, which dismissed the claimant’s application for an interim injunction. No appellate decision is stated in the judgment.