BL-2021-002235 - [2025] EWHC 2367 (Ch)

The respondent’s application of 9 September 2025, to stay the sentencing process, suffers from the same difficulty as the application of 13 August 2025. This is that, even if the fresh Part 7 proceedings were to survive any strike-out application, and were ultimately successful, and the order of 5 April 2022 were set aside (on whatever grounds), that setting aside would be prospective only. It would have no effect on either the respondent’s past conduct, or the judicial decision already made that the respondent was guilty of contempt of court in breaching that order. This is because an order made by a court of competent jurisdiction is valid and has to be obeyed, even though it is liable to be overturned on appeal or otherwise set aside, unless and until it is so successfully appealed or set aside.

In Hadkinson v Hadkinson [1952] P 285, Romer LJ, with whom Somervell LJ agreed) said, at 288:

“It is the plain and unqualified obligation of every person against, or in respect of whom, an order is made by a court of competent jurisdiction, to obey it unless and until that order is discharged. The uncompromising nature of this obligation is shown by the fact that it extends even to cases where the person affected by an order believes it to be irregular or even void. ‘A party who knows of an order, whether null and void, regular or irregular, cannot be permitted to disobey it ... It would be most dangerous to hold that the suitors, or their solicitors, could themselves judge whether an order was null and void - whether it was regular or irregular. That they should come to the court and not take upon themselves to determine such a question: that the course of a party knowing of an order, which was null and irregular and who might be affected by it was plain. He should apply to the court that it might be discharged. As long as it existed it must not be disobeyed.’ (Per Lord Cottenham LC in Chuck v Cremer (1846) Cooper temp Cottenham 205, 338.)”

Denning LJ delivered a concurring judgment.

The passage from the judgment of Romer LJ cited above was cited with approval by the Privy Council in Isaacs v Robertson [1985] AC 97, 101-102, which in turn was relied on by the House of Lords in M v Home Office [1994] 1 AC 377, 423. These authorities have been cited and relied on in numerous other cases. Most recently, the Supreme Court, in R (Majera) v Home Secretary [2022] AC 46, [56], cited with approval the passage from Hadkinson v Hadkinson set out above, and expressed the same view. The matter is simply beyond argument.

The other main argument made by the respondent is that the order of 5 April 2022 cannot stand because the family trust was not a party to the proceedings which led to that order. I dealt with this in one of the interlocutory extempore judgments that I gave on 23 July 2025. I said this ([2025] EWHC 2284 (Ch)):

“26.

What Mr Lukas Stanford [the respondent’s son] concludes is that the trust’s exclusion from these proceedings in 2022 rendered those proceedings procedurally defective. Well, even if rule 19.2(2) had said what Mr Lukas Stanford says it means, rule 3.10 of the Civil Procedure Rules says that a failure to comply with the rule does not invalidate a step taken in the proceedings, or indeed of course the proceedings themselves. So the proceedings are not, in fact, invalidated merely because if it were the case, which it is not, that a rule had not been followed but, in any event, the general rule in the English courts is that a claimant can sue who it wants and there is an old authority for that called Dollfus Mieg v Bank of England in 1951.

27.

In this case, the claim that was being made by the claimant was only about the defendant’s interest in All Saints shares, not the trust’s shareholding in All Saints shares. So the trust would not have been and could not have been prejudiced by the 2022 proceedings because it did not affect their shareholding. Any rights which the trust had before the declaration made by the deputy judge in 2022 it still has.”

The point attempted to be made has therefore already been decided in these proceedings. For these reasons, there is nothing in this argument.