Bargain Busting Limited v Shenzhen Ske Technology Company Limited & Ors

Criminal contempt protects the public interest in the administration of justice, not a litigant’s private interest in enforcing an order. The jurisdiction should be confined to cases where its exercise is properly justified.

Requests or submissions to a tribunal about the timing of an administrative act are not ordinarily false or misleading statements of fact. Nor is it improper contempt to advance a legally unsuccessful interpretation of an order. Where the relevant public authority alone controls the act in question, representations consistent with its established practice will not ordinarily create a sufficient risk of interference with the administration of justice.

The case concerned applications by Shenzhen SKE Technology Company Limited, Stobbs IP Limited, Wan-Yi Tsai and Jixuan Si to strike out contempt proceedings brought by Bargain Busting Limited. The proceedings arose from correspondence with the UK Intellectual Property Office about registration of the Crystal Bar trade mark after the High Court had dismissed an opposition appeal in [2025] EWHC 1629 (Ch).

BBL alleged that the correspondence intentionally interfered with the administration of justice by seeking to delay registration. BBL also sought to join Jan-Caspar Rebling, a supervising solicitor, as an additional respondent. The issues were whether the pleaded conduct disclosed a reasonable basis for criminal contempt and whether joinder was desirable under CPR rule 19.2.

1. Strike out. The contempt proceedings were struck out under CPR rule 3.4(2)(a). The court assumed the pleaded facts in BBL’s favour, but held that the allegations could not establish criminal contempt.
2. Public interest. Criminal contempt concerns interference with the public interest in the administration of justice. The absence of a permission requirement under CPR rule 81.3(5) did not remove the need to demonstrate that public interest. The procedural distinction between applications requiring permission and those made in existing proceedings was not the relevant watershed.
3. No sufficient interference. The IPO alone had power to register the mark. The parties could make submissions but could not direct or prevent registration. The challenged correspondence was consistent with the IPO Manual’s then-current guidance and established practice, under which implementation of a decision was suspended during the appeal process. Even assuming that two statements were false, they could not interfere with the administration of justice because the IPO knew the legal position and retained the decision-making power.
4. Requests and legal submissions. Requests were not relevantly capable of being false or misleading in fact. A statement of the respondents’ position expressed desire rather than an assertion of objective fact. Further, submitting that registration should be delayed, or advancing an incorrect construction of the order, was not improper conduct for the purposes of the criminal contempt test.
5. Mens rea. It was unnecessary to decide the mental element. In any event, the evidence disclosed no real prospect of proving that the respondents appreciated, or were reckless as to whether, their emails created a significant risk of interference with the administration of justice.
6. Joinder. The application to join Mr Rebling fell away. It would in any event have been dismissed under CPR rule 19.2. His addition was neither necessary nor desirable because the client, the firm and the authors of the correspondence were already respondents, and joinder would consume resources without advancing resolution of the allegations.

First-instance decision. The judgment notes that the underlying intellectual property appeal was dismissed by the High Court in [2025] EWHC 1629 (Ch), but the present applications were not appeals from that decision.