The sovereign investment fund of one of the United Arab Emirates has denied knowing about a meeting at which its lawyer, Dechert’s former head of white collar crime, is said to have put witnesses through ‘perjury school’, the High Court has heard.
Aviation tycoon Farhad Azima is suing the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority (RAKIA), its former lawyers Dechert and retired partner Neil Gerrard for alleged involvement in the hacking and publication of his emails ahead of a multi-million pound fraud trial.
He claims RAKIA hacked his emails before using them in a case in which the High Court found Azima engaged in ‘seriously fraudulent conduct’. His counterclaim, alleging RAKIA was responsible for the hacking, was dismissed.
But last year Azima’s hacking claim was remitted by the Court of Appeal, which found there were grounds to consider whether ‘RAKIA’s defence to the counterclaim was dishonestly advanced’. RAKIA, Gerrard and Dechert all deny responsibility for the hacking or dissemination of Azima’s data.
Azima also claims Gerrard put key witnesses through a ‘mock trial’ at a boutique Swiss hotel ahead of the trial to rehearse a false account about the ‘innocent discovery’ of his emails online, which is denied ‘in the strongest possible terms’.
In their amended written defence, Dechert and Gerrard say Gerrard attended the meeting in order to explain ‘the process of giving evidence’ to private investigator Stuart Page and that ‘Gerrard did not conduct a “mock trial” as alleged or at all’.
However, RAKIA says in its updated defence that the meeting was ‘outside the scope of [Dechert’s] retainer and instructions and RAKIA was not made aware that it was taking place’, which Azima’s lawyers say is a ‘curious conflict between the defences’.
‘According to RAKIA, this was not a meeting for them and it was not a meeting that they knew anything about and presumably that also means – it must mean – it was not a meeting that [RAKIA’s solicitors] Stewarts knew anything about,’ Thomas Plewman QC told the High Court today. ‘But then Dechert admit that they were doing this in order to prepare, in order to explain, to Mr Page … the process of giving evidence.’
He said that, on their account, ‘Dechert has taken it on itself and Mr Gerrard has taken it upon himself to prepare the witnesses without the knowledge of the then-claimant and without the knowledge of the claimant’s solicitors’.
Plewman added that the meeting was ‘a very secret arrangement involving bodyguards and burner phones at a chalet in the Swiss mountains’.
The allegation emerged at the latest hearing in the long-running litigation, to determine issues of disclosure and whether Azima should pay just over £2m in security for costs.
Hugh Tomlinson QC, for RAKIA, said in written submissions that the ‘core issue in [Azima’s claim] is whether RAKIA and the other additional defendants were responsible for the acquisition and publication of the hacked data in 2016’.
He argued that the disclosure sought by Azima in relation to the meeting in Switzerland is unnecessary as ‘the allegation of a conspiracy to concoct false evidence more than two years later in 2018/2019 is only indirectly relevant to that core issue’.
Laura Newton, for Dechert and Gerrard, emphasised that Page – who has ‘switched sides’ and is now giving evidence in support of Azima’s claims – was found by the High Court to be ‘an unsatisfactory and unreliable witness’ and described his allegations as ‘spurious’.
The hearing is expected to conclude this afternoon.
