Griffiths v Gourlay & Ors

1. LORD JUSTICE LEWISON: 1. This is a renewed application for permission to appeal against an order of Simon LJ, whereby which he refused relief against sanctions with the consequence that the defences to a number of petitions under section 994 of the Companies Act remained struck out.

2. The application concerned responses to a Request for Further Information pursuant to an Unless Order. There were 88 requests which had to be responded to. Twenty-five were originally criticised as not being adequate responses. Some of those criticisms fell away in the course of the application. The judge himself dealt with four of them. But nonetheless he refused to grant relief against sanctions.

3. Mr Lightman, on behalf of the would-be appellants, says that the judge failed to consider stage 3 of the three-stage process in the Denton case. The judge failed to consider the nature of the claim, namely petitions under section 994 which require the court to be satisfied that unfair prejudice has occurred in relation to the particular company, and also that there were three or more companies involved here and the failure to give adequate particulars related to only one of them.

4. Mr Lightman also says that the judge did not consider what I have labelled "partial severance", that is to say refusing relief against sanctions only in relation to those paragraphs of the defences which had not been adequately particularised and allowing relief against sanctions in relation to those paragraphs which had been adequately particularised.

5. I am satisfied that certainly on what I call the partial severance point there is a point of principle here which does have a real prospect of success.

6. The question then is whether to limit the grant of permission to that point only or whether to allow Mr Lightman to argue all the grounds contained in paragraph 24 of the grounds of appeal. I do not consider that it would be profitable to attempt to weed out those particular grounds, many of which are interlinked and for those reasons I propose to grant permission to appeal on the grounds set out in paragraph 24 of the grounds of appeal. I will refuse permission to appeal in relation to all other grounds and just for the record, I will refuse permission to appeal against the preceding order made by Mr Monty QC which imposed the Unless Order in the first place.