A Cross Border Study Of Freezing Orders And Provisional Measures

This book compares the law on provisional measures of common law and civil law countries, the goal being to identify and compare their main advantages and disadvantages. The guiding concept is a well-known statement by the Justices of the US Supreme Court expressed in the famous Grupo Mexicano case, according to which the “age of slow-moving capital and comparatively immobile wealth” has now passed, and the 21st century requires a fresh look at the law of provisional measures. In the quest to find a model for interim relief, the Mareva Injunction, subsequently renamed the ‘Freezing Order’ in the English Civil Procedural Rules, is used as the benchmark to which each of the targeted systems discussed here is compared. This is because international scholarship, as well as e.g. the US Supreme Court, generally consider the Mareva Injunction to be the most effective and farthest-reaching provisional remedy. The analysis suggests that the Mareva Injunction / Freezing Order represents the type of relief that will most likely continue to dominate as the most efficient and farthest-reaching interim measure in the years to come.

Because of the rise in cross-border disputes – and due to the ease with which assets can be moved around the world with the help of online banking and fiduciary service providers – parties are increasingly finding themselves suing or being sued outside their home jurisdictions. This book is about how to find out whether a defendant has any assets before initiating costly litigation, arbitration, or insolvency proceedings, and if so how to freeze such assets with the aim of eventually enforcing a judgment or award. Nineteen country chapters by lawyers with decades of hands-on experience in helping their clients find, freeze, and attach defendants’ assets provide practical guidance to legal professionals representing parties in cross-border commercial lawsuits, international arbitration proceedings, simple debt collection matters, enforcement proceedings, divorce proceedings, inheritance matters, and other legal matters where the assets in dispute are thought to be located abroad. Each contribution offers an overview of the pre-trial asset tracing techniques and rules regulating freezing orders and enforcement methods in the jurisdiction covered, describing not just what the law says but how the law actually works. The jurisdictions covered include several of the offshore havens that are frequently used to hide assets in. The authors attend to such issues and topics as the following: • investigating whether a potential counterparty owns vessels, aircrafts, motor vehicles, real estate, or intellectual property rights; • locating offshore trusts; • discovering assets transferred to a family member or corporate entity; • exposing sham investments designed to generate a (fictitious) loss of assets; and • invoking remedies available to a party facing asset shielding manoeuvres. This book will quickly become an indispensable tool for international litigators, arbitration lawyers, and lawyers involved in cross-border insolvency and debt recovery proceedings, as well as for academics and scholars involved in legal research projects or law reform programs. Renowned litigator Robert Shapiro says in his Foreword: 'The authors provide the reader with practical guidance into the complex area of cross-border asset tracing and do so in a very down-to-earth way, without the academic hyperbole that generally burdens modern legal textbooks.'

The book focusses on applying a holistic overview of interim measures and associated procedures in the context of cross-border private law (civil and commercial) disputes that are the subject of international litigation and arbitration proceedings. It reexamines key features of said problem and outlines novel findings on interim relief in the area of international dispute resolution. The book analyses the rules of EU law (EU law regulations such as the Regulation Brussels Ibis and the rest of the Brussels regime) as the single system of cross-border jurisdictional rules, as well as the rules of international arbitration (both commercial and investment). In the process, it conducts a complete mapping of interim measures problems and explores the criteria for granting relief under national laws. For this purpose, it includes an extensive comparative law overview of many jurisdictions in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, etc., to reveal common standards for granting interim relief. Interim relief is a salient problem in dispute resolution, and serious international disputes usually require requests for such measures. This makes a more complete understanding all the more important. For scholars and practitioners alike, there are various ways to seek relief; precisely this complexity calls for a more complex and multilayered analysis, which does not (as is usually the case) adopt the perspective of either litigation or arbitration, but instead weighs the pros and cons and considers the viability and reliability of the different options, viewed from all angles.

This book is a follow-up to the comprehensive Managing Business Disputes in Today’s China: Duelling with Dragons (2007) guide on foreign direct investment disputes that can arise in the course of initiating and operating a Chinese joint venture. Since its inauguration by the Chinese government in 2013, the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) has included projects in more than 70 countries spanning diverse economic and legal environments. The nature of the BRI coupled with the economic downturn as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic will inevitably generate more challenges than ever. Like its predecessor, this book poses a hypothetical scenario in order to explore the potential issues that may arise from Chinese-foreign business relationships in the BRI context. After setting the scene with the ‘Afrina Government’s’ ill-fated infrastructure project involving Chinese and foreign parties, subsequent chapters provide comprehensive insight on and highlight the following issues that one must consider when dealing with BRI disputes: dispute settlement options; informal dispute settlement approaches; disputes involving Chinese State-Owned Enterprises; construction and project finance disputes; corruption and bribery; sanctions; environmental issues. This book will provide extensive guidance from seasoned practitioners on the legal and practical issues of disputes that arise from engaging with Chinese companies doing business outside China in the context of BRI projects.

This comprehensive Commentary provides article-by-article exploration of EU Regulation 655/2014, analysing and outlining in a straightforward manner the steps that lawyers, businesses and banks can take when involved in debt recovery. It offers a detailed discussion of national practice and legislation in order to provide context and a deeper understanding of the complex difficulties surrounding the procedural system created by the European Account Preservation Order (EAPO) Regulation.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the concept of the direct enforcement of foreign restraint and confiscation orders, a crucial step in the process of asset recovery, including existing legal approaches and related challenges. In order to provide a balanced and informed overview, 31 jurisdictions, representing different United Nations regional groups and legal systems (civil law / common law / mixed systems), were selected as the focus of the analysis. This approach provides a meaningful picture of the situation worldwide from which generally applicable guidance could be drawn. The study suggests a series of practical steps and good practices for consideration by (1) countries exploring the possibility of introducing a direct enforcement mechanism into their domestic legal frameworks and (2) countries that are already in a position to directly enforce foreign confi scation orders but that are considering options to streamline processes and maximize results obtainable via direct enforcement approaches. This new StAR Initiative knowledge product is addressed to a broad range of law enforcement, justice, and asset recovery practitioners, as well as bodies involved in legislative and regulatory processes. It will be a useful tool in their work.

The Research Handbook on Cross-border Enforcement of Intellectual Property systematically analyses the unique difficulties posed by cross-border intellectual property disputes in the modern world. The contributions to this book focus on the enf

This book sets out the way that, through enhanced private antitrust enforcement reform, private international law has a pivotal role in EU competition law disputes with an international element. The author offers a thorough analysis of the post-2003 policy of the EU favouring private law enforcement of EU competition law and its implementation under the existing provisions for jurisdiction and recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments under the Brussels I regime. The book also considers how the jurisdiction, recognition and enforcement of judgments issues are dealt with in England under the common law rules applicable when Brussels I does not apply. The complex private international law problems in respect of cross-border class actions that have arisen in several countries, as well as judgments in relation to antitrust infringements, are also discussed. The author further examines the choice of law issues that may arise before the English courts under Rome I and Rome II. The potential problems regarding jurisdiction of arbitral tribunals and choice of law in arbitral proceedings in relation to EU competition law claims, and the jurisdiction of English courts in proceedings ancillary to arbitration claims, are dealt with accordingly. This title is included in Bloomsbury Professional's International Arbitration online service.

"The law governing international civil litigation has changed dramatically in the five years since the fourth edition was published. Recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court have had a significant impact on fields such as personal jurisdiction, sovereign immunity, and extraterritoriality. This current edition reflects those changes and raises important questions about the broader implications of those decisions ... Developments in this field are of course not limited to the United States. While the book still focuses primarily on United States law, the current edition deliberately incorporates more excerpts, more extensive references, and more questions concerning foreign law, especially European law. In part, this reflects an important reality--that successful practice in this area, even for the United States lawyer, requires a keen understanding of other legal systems". -- PREFACE OF THE FIFTH EDITON.

Interim remedies and provisional measures are a critical component of civil/commercial litigation and arbitration. The objective of this book is to set out not just the law and practice in relation to the primary interim remedies and preservation measures available in England & Wales and China, but also to provide the comparative analysis between the two jurisdictions concerning these interim measures. The system for interim remedies in England & Wales is well-established, but preservation measures in China are a work in progress and many differences exist between the two legal systems, both in terms of theory and practice. For example, China does not recognise the general concept of interim measures, if looked at from the English law point of view, though it does have similar concepts of Property preservation, evidence preservation and behaviour preservation. China has recently adopted Chinese Civil Code 2020 and in writing this book the authors have incorporated all the relevant elements from the new Code. There is no equivalent of Practice Directions in China, and this book provides provide much needed clarity on this area, drawing together the law and guidance which is presently scattered across numerous local courts in the different provinces. This is an important book that is likely to have a significant impact on existing scholarship regarding interim remedies in England, Wales and China, and be of interest of all parties involved in cross-border litigation. Its readership will include industry professionals, academics, policy-makers and government officials.