[2025] EWHC 1955 (KB)

The Applicant alleges (and frequently repeated in oral submissions) that “it was a serious miscarriage of justice for the Court to recognise that respondent submitted tampered evidence to the Court, and where HMCTS verified the fraud, but yet the Court found that, ‘why should the solicitors fraud affect the Respondent’s case’.

This relates not to the Order made by the Judge following Trial, but an order made by DJ Watkins in which he set aside default judgment entered on 14 September 2023 in the proceedings in the Applicant’s favour.

One of the issues was whether default judgment had been entered wrongly. A second issue was, in the alternative, if the default judgment had been entered correctly, the judgment should nevertheless be set aside pursuant to CPR13.3 because the Defendant had a real prospect of successfully defending the Claim or there are other good reasons to set the judgment aside.

The short answers to these complaints insofar as they might constitute an arguable Ground of Appeal against the Judge’s determination of the issues at trial are (1) the complaint does not relate to the Order under Appeal, but a prior order made by a different judge and which has already been the subject of an unsuccessful appeal; (2) in any event, the determination to set aside the judgment was plainly correct in law – irrespective of the factual question of whether the acknowledgement of service was or was not filed in time – given that the Club were plainly capable of demonstrating that they had a real prospect of success. Although Mr Askan clearly believes the decision of DJ Watkins to set the judgment aside was an injustice, it was not. It was the correct application of the law irrespective of whether the Club’s solicitors had or had not acknowledged service in time or had or had not sought to mislead the Court about this upon the set aside application.

Of course, if DJ Watkins considered, on the evidence before him, that the solicitors had wilfully misrepresented the position as to filing the acknowledgement of service, this would have been good reason to report them to their regulatory body and/or potentially take the initiative in respect of contempt proceedings. However, this would not of itself mean the Club did not, on its second ground, have a legitimate reason under the CPR to have the default judgment set aside. There has been no miscarriage of justice in the decision to permit the merits of Mr Askan’s claim and the Club’s Part 20 Club proceed to trial and determination on its merits.

This is not, therefore, an arguable ground of appeal.