The Persons Identified in Schedule 1 v Standard Chartered Plc

In securities litigation, particulars of standing must enable the court and defendant to identify the factual basis of each claimant’s statutory claim. This includes the claimant’s legal personality, authority to sue, ownership or management of relevant funds, and the shares bought, held and sold which form the subject matter of the claim.

Compliance is ordinarily demonstrated in one intelligible document. Trading data must be based on each claimant’s instructions and evidence, rather than assumptions or interpretations made by experts. These requirements are matters of case management, not a statutory test of standing imposed by the Financial Services Act 2000 or the Civil Procedure Rules.

The defendant applied for orders requiring 226 claimants to amend their further particulars of standing and provide clean trading data. The proceedings included claims under section 90 and section 90A of the Financial Services Act 2000 arising from rights-issue prospectuses and alleged misconduct affecting securities held in the secondary market.

The claimants had served spreadsheets containing information about legal personality, ownership, claims and trading data, but some information was incomplete or inconsistent. The central issues were whether the existing material complied with an earlier case-management order and what particulars and trading information the court should require.

1. Further particulars. The claimants had not complied with the earlier order requiring particulars of all material facts relied on to establish claims under section 90 and/or section 90A. Information dispersed between spreadsheets and trading data did not provide an intelligible single-document account from which compliance could be verified.
2. Scope of information required. The required particulars included each claimant’s legal personality, the funds owned or managed, authority to sue, and particulars of the relevant shares, including purchases, periods of holding and sales. The purpose was to enable the defendant and court to assess whether the claimants had valid claims and to ensure that claimants had engaged with the litigation.
3. Case management basis. Section 90 and section 90A do not use the word standing, and the court was not referred to an authoritative statutory or procedural test prescribing the particulars required in Financial List securities litigation. The requirements were therefore imposed as case-management directions for this litigation.
4. Clean trading data. Claimants who had not already done so were required to provide data based on their own instructions and evidence. Data consisting of expert assumptions or educated interpretations was insufficient. The minimum information included purchase and sale dates, number of shares, prices and details of the individual trades.
5. Orders. The claimants were ordered to serve the combined particulars by 4.00 pm on 12 April 2024 and clean trading data within 56 days, specified in the concluding order as 23 May 2024. No unless order was made at that stage, although one could follow if claimants failed to give proper and prompt instructions.

First-instance case-management decision. No appellate history was stated in the judgment.