High Court hands down judgment on Jaffé v Greybull Capital LLP

The High Court handed down judgment on Jaffé v Greybull Capital LLP [2024] EWHC 2534 (Comm), following a 3-week, multimillion-pound Commercial Court fraud claim brought by the insolvency administrator of Wirecard.

The Claimants had sought c. £12m in damages for deceit, alleging that a deliberate oral misrepresentation at a meeting in 2016 led to Wirecard Bank extending credit to Monarch Airlines (which subsequently became insolvent). Mrs Justice Cockerill DBE dismissed the case in its entirety. In her judgment, she considered the conflicting accounts of two “equally patently honest and truthful witnesses”, the inherent probabilities and the surrounding circumstances, and, notwithstanding a near-contemporaneous note of the meeting taken by one of the Claimants’ witnesses, concluded that the alleged misrepresentations had not been made.  The Judge agreed with the Defendants that German law applied to the claim and considered and applied the German law of causation, concluding that even if the misrepresentations had been made, they had not been relied upon.

Of particular interest is the Judge’s consideration of “Gestmin” and the matters raised by Popplewell LJ in his 2023 COMBAR lecture “Judging Truth from Memory”.

John Wardell KC, instructed by Andrew Head, Bryan Shacklady and David Young (Forsters LLP) and leading Thomas Elias (Serle Court), acted on behalf of the successful Defendants.

Read the full judgment