CR-2022-003280 - [2024] EWHC 1610 (Ch)

Mr Chambi has been investigating Mr Aristodemou’s affairs since March 2017. He began with a sense of grievance at their contrasting worldly fortunes which has only magnified. He has done all in his power to bring down Mr Aristodemou, among other things reporting him to the Police, Action Fraud and the Insolvency Service, and assisting some of the Company’s debtors in resisting its claims to payment. He believes Mr Aristodemou to have diverted hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Company, effectively at his half-expense. The surprise in his evidence was not that he was on the lookout for traps in cross-examination, or that he had rehearsed his answers thoroughly, but that he gave his evidence calmly and with relative equanimity, trying to understand (and sometimes second-guess) each question. There were times, for example his story of how he appended Mr Aristodemou’s electronic signature to a false employment agreement between himself and the Company (in the presence of Mr Aristodemou, as they experimented with whether it would work), when he lapsed from a straight account; and as that document shows, he was not averse to crossing the line himself on occasion. It is also the case, as with every witness at this trial, that events were a long time ago, poorly recorded, and, as to their legal effect, little understood then or now; but taken as a whole, his evidence was generally reliable.