Claimants must prove facts in second tracing claim—previous order is background (Ward and others v Savill)

Article summary

Dispute Resolution analysis: The claim concerns the remedy of tracing monies into assets held by wrongdoers, or persons to whom wrongdoers have transferred property. That is the backcloth to the determination of a preliminary issue regarding the status of a judgment in a previous case involving the same claimants but different defendants. The declaration in the first case that the claimants had retained a beneficial interest in monies transferred to the alleged fraudsters did not provide a short-cut in the present one. This is because (i) it was not an ‘in rem’ decision, binding the whole world, and (ii) it could not be used to avoid the need to prove the claimant’s retention of beneficial ownership of the monies they had ‘invested’. The judgment analyses case law on the status of a court’s decision, and signals how rare it is for a decision to considered to be made in rem, identifying the significance that legal...