A high-profile American venture capitalist has lost an appeal against a suspended prison sentence for contempt of court in a £200,000 dispute with London firm Farrer & Co, with a Court of Appeal judge today saying her six-month term ‘might well have been longer’.
Julie Meyer, chief executive officer of Viva Investment Partners, was held in contempt in January for a ‘deliberate, cynical and continuing’ breach of court orders requiring her to provide financial documents and refusing to attend court in person for debtor questioning.
Mr Justice Kerr imposed a suspended sentence, saying Meyer ‘has shown herself in these proceedings to be a selfish and untrustworthy person [and] her word counts for nothing if it suits her to break it’. Meyer – who is a resident in Switzerland – also failed to attend a separate hearing in February, at which Kerr issued a warrant for her arrest.
The 55-year-old appealed against the finding of contempt, arguing Kerr did not have jurisdiction because Farrer & Co did not comply with procedural requirements. She also said the sentence was excessive. However, her appeal was unanimously dismissed today following a hearing last week at which Meyer was neither present nor represented.
Lord Justice Males ruled that Meyer’s ‘procedural complaints’ about the service of orders requiring her to attend court and the fact that one did not contain a penal notice were ‘entirely technical’.
It is ‘striking’ that Meyer’s skeleton argument for the appeal did not argue that ‘any of these supposed procedural deficiencies had caused Ms Meyer the slightest prejudice’, the judge said. ‘It is equally striking that there is no submission in the skeleton argument that any of these procedural deficiencies had been relied on, or even mentioned, at the hearing before Mr Justice Kerr,’ he added.
Meyer’s appeal against sentence was also dismissed, with the court finding that Kerr was ‘right to conclude that this was a deliberate and cynical breach of the order which would continue unless Ms Meyer was coerced into obeying it’.
Males also said Meyer was not sent an embargoed draft of the judgment to ‘in view of the fact that she has been found guilty of contempt of court in the circumstances described in the judgment, demonstrating a willingness to disregard the orders of the court if it suits her to do so’.
