Litigation & Dispute Resolution

The Court recently set out an interesting ruling on costs relating to an application for indemnity costs and a third party costs order. The First Defendant (the “Defendant”) applied to have the Plaintiff and any third parties who may have caused, controlled or funded the Plaintiff’s claim, pay the Defendant’s costs on an indemnity basis and an order for the third party funder to be liable for costs. In the present case, the Plaintiff had commenced a derivative claim against the Defendant in January 2015 but the Ex Parte Order granted on 21 January 2015 for injunctive relief and leave to serve out of the jurisdiction (the “Ex Parte Order”) was subsequently set aside in the Chief Justice’s ruling on 4 December 2015. In this ruling, the Judge held that the Plaintiff lacked standing to commence a derivative claim as the Plaintiff was not the registered shareholder and had failed to establish that there was a serious issue to be tried against the anchor defendant company as it no longer was in the control of the wrongdoer.

In early July of this year, I wrote a blog post detailing two proposed Criminal Law Reform bills: the Disclosure and Criminal Reform Act 2015 (the “Disclosure Act”) and the Criminal Jurisdiction and Procedure Act 2015 (the “Procedure Act”). At that point, the Bills had been passed by the House of Assembly on 5 June 2015 and remained to be debated in the Senate.

Bermuda Press (Holdings) Ltd. (“BPHL”), the parent company for the local daily newspaper The Royal Gazette, commenced proceedings against the Registrar of the Supreme Court (the “Registrar”) following the Registrar’s refusal of BPHL’s application to obtain copies of Affidavits and Exhibits filed in a case pending in the Supreme Court. The case involved a dispute between Allied Development Partners and the Government of Bermuda with reference to the Hamilton Waterfront. BPHL sought to challenge the accepted legal view that documentation being used in ongoing legal proceedings is not open to public inspection, even if the parties to the proceedings do not oppose access to the documentation.