Loudmila Bourlakova & Ors v The Estate of Oleg Bourlakov & Ors

A court-appointed representative under Civil Procedure Rules Part 19.12 must act in the best interests of the estate as a whole, but need not remain neutral between adversarial parties. The court may intervene, including by removal, where the representative fails to act in those interests. Parallel proceedings abroad do not automatically make a claim abusive. Before directing discontinuance or a stay, the court needs a clear account of the foreign proceedings, their scope and intended outcome. Concerns about inconsistent judgments, recognition and duplication may instead justify later case management. A claimant is not unfairly treated merely because the representative pleads the estate’s matrimonial-property rights while leaving the claimant to advance any competing rights.

The Claimants sought a direction preventing Nicholas Jacob, appointed under Civil Procedure Rules Part 19.12 to represent the estate of the deceased first defendant, from pursuing a defence and counterclaim based on Ukrainian matrimonial-property rights. Related matrimonial-property and estate proceedings were pending in Monaco and Latvia, while the English proceedings concerned alleged asset misappropriation and overlapping counterclaims. The Claimants relied on abuse of process, unfairness, duplication, inconsistent judgments and recognition risks. The representative relied on his duty to protect the estate and the viability of the claims. The central issues were whether the court could intervene in his litigation decisions, whether the English claim was abusive or unfair, and whether case-management concerns justified requiring it to be abandoned or stayed.

The MPR Application was refused.

1. Representative’s role. A representative under Civil Procedure Rules Part 19.12 must act in the best interests of the estate as a whole and impartially between competing persons interested in it, but need not act neutrally between litigants. The court may intervene, including by possible removal, where the representative fails to act in the estate’s interests. A different litigation strategy preferred by another party is insufficient.
2. Abuse and procedural fairness. Pursuing related claims in different jurisdictions is not necessarily an abuse of process. The English MPR claim was viable, within the court’s jurisdiction and authorised by prior directions. The status, scope and intended outcome of the Monaco proceedings remained unclear, as did the Latvian proceedings. That lack of clarity prevented a finding of abuse or a direction requiring the claim to be relinquished. The abuse allegation had also not been clearly made in the original application and evidence; raising it only in submissions would have denied a fair opportunity to respond.
3. Fairness. It was for the Claimants, not the representative, to decide whether to plead their own MPR rights. Pleading the estate’s entitlement without doing so did not make the representative unfair or one-sided. The fairness principle in Lehman Bros Australia Ltd v McNamara and others [2020] EWCA Civ 321 did not justify intervention on these facts.
4. Case management. Concerns about inconsistent judgments, recognition and duplicative litigation were legitimate, especially because the Monaco proceedings concerned the wider matrimonial estate and included a party absent from England. They were more appropriately addressed by a case-management order, potentially including a stay, than by compelling discontinuance of a properly brought claim. The court therefore declined the application. A CMC was to take place after the November 2026 Monaco hearing, with concrete information about the proceedings and written submissions on consequential matters. The parties were also required to address the overlap with the other counterclaims subject to the split trial.

not stated in the judgment.