[2025] EWHC 1930 (Comm)

I have before me an application notice issued on 1 April 2025 by which the Defendants applied for an order for security for costs of these consolidated proceedings against the Claimant (“Cedar Mundi”) in the amount of £2.5 million. The application was listed, unusually, as a heavy application and took a full day of pre-reading and a full day of oral argument, which included extensive citation of authority from a bundle of authorities running to some 31 cases and materials. This may seem surprising given that the court’s gateway jurisdiction to make the order is not in issue, and the contest is over discretion: but as always with a set of principles which govern the exercise of the court’s discretion, they are easier to state than to apply. The application was very well prepared by the solicitors on both sides, and attractively and succinctly argued by both leading and (on the Defendants’ side) junior counsel, and I am grateful for the assistance.

Pursuant to directions given by Andrew Baker J at the case management conference on 31 March 2025, the consolidated claims are listed for a four week trial between 25 February and 24 March 2026. The parties are currently undertaking disclosure.

Before I turn to the issues which I have to decide, it is necessary for me to set out in brief the factual and procedural background that have brought the parties to court. I adopt them, with all due deference and some abbreviation, principally from the parties’ skeleton arguments, which were provided to me in Word precisely so that I would not have to spend time composing my own summary from scratch. However, I have checked them against the material at the references I was given.