Jason Woodland on parallel criminal & civil proceedings
- Two recent court decisions reaffirm that there must be a ‘real’, rather than merely ‘notional’, risk of injustice when applying to stay civil fraud claims because of a related criminal investigation.
Defendants to civil proceedings for fraud will often find themselves also subject to parallel criminal proceedings or investigations. This can leave the defendant in a difficult position: how to deal with the civil claim before knowing the extent of the criminal charges or the evidence relied on by the prosecution?
Uncompromising approach
In recent times, the civil courts have taken an uncompromising approach to defendants faced with this problem, and required them to deal with both sets of proceedings in parallel. A defendant faced with this situation is often perceived as trying to ‘play the system’ and avoid setting out their position. As the judge put it in Panton v Financial Institutions Services Limited [2003] UKPC 95, [2003] All ER (D) 294 (Dec) ‘a stay would not be granted simply to serve the tactical advantages that the defendants
