Leigh Day has been found to have been negligent after 6,624 of the claimants it represented in the Trafigura trial over chemical waste spillage did not receive their £30m compensation.
The claim was brought by Sylvie Aya Agouman, one of the 30,000 claimants who accepted the Trafigura settlement agreement in 2009 but who received nothing from it.
Leigh Day denied that the firm was negligent in breach of trust and said that the loss was “too remote to be recoverable”.
Mr Justice Andrew Smith ruled that Leigh Day should not have deposited the £30m settlement in a bank in the Ivory Coast because of the risk of a dishonest claim being made on it.
Trafigura paid CFAF 22.7m (£2.7m) sum in Leigh Day’s name into a bank account following a settlement in 2009 with 30,000 claimants. This amount would be distributed pending a deduction for community representatives and some administrative costs.
La Coordination Nationale des Victimes des Decherts Toxiques de Cote D’Ivoire (CNVDT) obtained from the Ivory Coast courts a “freezing order” over the monies in the Leigh Day Société Générale de Banque en Cote d’Ivoire (SGBCI) account, and then in January 2010 the Court of Appeal ordered that the monies be transferred to CNVDT.
Leigh Day entered into agreements with CNVDT, the result of which was that some 23,000 of the Trafigura claimants were paid their share of the settlement sum
Andrew Smith J ruled that “because Leigh Day arranged the settlement sum to be held in SGBCI and kept it there until the so-called freezing order was made, Agouman was paid nothing from it”.
The legal lineup
For the claimant, Sylvie Aya Agouman
2 Temple Gardens’ Jacqueline Perry QC and Andrew Bershadski, instructed by Harding Mitchell principal Kalilou Fadiga
For the respondent, Leigh Day
4 New Square’s Jamie Smith QC, instructed by Bond Dickinson partner Gary Oldroyd and associate Clare White