London High Court News

Newcastle United football club co-owner Amanda Staveley on Monday lost a London High Court battle with a Greek shipping tycoon over a historic debt of nearly 3.5 million pounds ($4.4 million).Staveley, who owns 10% of the Premier League side with her husband, denied she was liable to Victor Restis for a sum that had snowballed with interest to over 36 million pounds.The total bill had included around 31 million pounds in interest, accruing at 505,000 pounds per day. Restis' lawyers…

Nord Stream is seeking more than 400 million euros ($436 million) from its insurers over explosions in 2022 which ruptured pipelines designed to transport Russian gas to Germany, court filings show.Nord Stream AG names Lloyd's Insurance Company and Arch Insurance (EU) DAC as defendants in its lawsuit, which was filed at London's High Court last month.Switzerland-based Nord Stream confirmed in an email there is a contractual dispute in London commercial courts between itself and insurers of the pipeline system."However…

Shell is suing Greenpeace for $2.1 million in damages after the environmental group's activists boarded the company's oil production vessel in transit at sea this year, according to Greenpeace and a document seen by Reuters.The British oil and gas major filed the claim in London's High Court. Greenpeace activists boarded the vessel in January near the Canary Islands off the Atlantic coast of northern Africa to protest oil drilling and traveled on it as far as Norway.In an email to Reuters…

President Vladimir Putin signed on Wednesday a decree transferring to Russia's state nuclear power company Rosatom state-owned shares of the Far Eastern Shipping Company, parent company of transportation group Fesco.Fesco was formerly controlled by Ziyavudin Magomedov, who was convicted last year on organized crime and embezzlement charges and is serving a 19-year jail sentence following one of the highest-profile prosecutions of a Russian tycoon in years.Magamedov says the charges are unfounded and is appealing his conviction.

Britain said on Tuesday it would return asylum seekers to a barge on its southern coast as opponents of the policy argued in court that such housing was unlawful.In an embarrassment for the Conservative government's immigration policy, legionella bacteria was detected in the water system of the Bibby Stockholm barge in August, just days after dozens of asylum seekers had been moved on.Following safety tests, the government has started sending letters to asylum seekers confirming they will be moved to the barge, an interior ministry spokesperson said.The government wants to cut the 8 million po

Russian tycoon Ziyavudin Magomedov, jailed at home in Russia, has launched a London lawsuit seeking nearly $14 billion over his holdings in valuable port operators, which he says were seized as part of a state-backed conspiracy.The businessman filed the lawsuit at London's High Court on July 20 against several defendants, including Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom, oil pipeline operator Transneft, private equity firm TPG, and UAE-based port operator DP World.Magomedov…

Legal and professional services firm Ince Group Plc plans to enter administration and pursue a sale of the company, it said on April 12, amid cash concerns and repeated delays in reporting its financial results.Ince's directors applied to London's High Court on April 12 to appoint administrators under UK insolvency law in relation to the company and four subsidiaries, court filings show.Trading in Ince on London's Alternative Investment Market was suspended from Jan.

The cargo vessel that blocked global shipping in the Suez Canal and is caught in a legal dispute in Egypt is fit to sail once approval is given, its technical manager said on Wednesday.The Ever Given was declared suitable for onward passage from the Great Bitter Lake to Port Said, where she would be assessed again before departing for Rotterdam, Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM) said in a statement.The ship has been in the lake, which sits between two sections of the canal, since being dislodged on March 29.

BP's oil trading business, one of the biggest in the sector, reported a rare loss in the fourth quarter after it lost a $70 million lawsuit over an oil cargo delivered to a Moroccan refinery. BP's Chief Financial Officer Brian Gilvary said due to flat trading positions ahead of a crucial OPEC meeting at the end of November, and the lawsuit, the company's oil trading division made a "small loss" in the fourth quarter. "There was a natural inclination to flatten up all of the books and there was also an adverse court ruling against us which is a $70 million hit," he told analysts on Tuesday.

A legal attempt by Iran's main oil tanker firm NITC to stop the European Union from reimposing sanctions on it over its disputed nuclear program has failed in a London court, setting back Tehran's efforts to ease trade restrictions. Iran is engaged in nuclear talks with world powers as it tries to strike a final deal to lift the sanctions that have halved its oil exports to just over 1 million barrels per day since 2012 and hammered its economy. EU governments were due imminently to re-include NITC, a major carrier of Iran's oil, on a blacklist of people and entities targeted by the bloc's sanctions, High Court Judge Nicholas Green said on Monday.

Royal Dutch Shell is ready to pay up to 30 million pounds ($51 million) in compensation for two oil spills in Nigeria in 2008 after a London court rejected a larger claim, sources involved in the case said on Friday. Around 11,000 residents of the Bodo community in the Niger Delta represented by law firm Leigh Day appealed in 2011 to a London court for more than 300 million pounds in compensation for the spilling of 500,000 barrels of oil. The sources said a Shell offer from September 2013 to settle the case for 30 million pounds remained on the table. The lawyer representing the claimants on Friday rejected the sum. "Shell have consistently sought to underestimate the damage whilst paying only lip service to an apology.

A top judge ruled on Wednesday that the crew of the largest British ship ever to be lost at sea was not to blame for the vessel's sinking. All 44 people on board died when the 169,000 ton cargo ship MV Derbyshire went down in Typhoon Orchid off the coast of Japan in 1980. Relatives of the crew had earlier crowded into London's High Court to hear Justice Colman announce the result of the second inquiry into why the Teesside-built ship sank. They had been disappointed by an inconclusive first inquiry in 1987 and then outraged by a 1998 assessors' report that the crew had failed to secure the lid to the hatch on the foredeck, causing the sinking.

Stelios Haji-Ioannou's tanker company Stelmar is poised to swoop on a fleet of modern petroleum products tankers but the deal has become ensnared by a bitter legal battle. The dispute is between the tankers' owner, First International, controlled by the high-profile shipping entrepreneur Paul Slater, and the company's financiers Berliner Bank, industry sources say. "Berliner Bank is leaning heavily on (Slater) to sign the company across to them, but the ships are mainly financed through U.S. bonds -- and the bondholders want to sell to Stelmar. They won't let Paul sign the company across to Berliner," said one industry source. The fleet…

Environmentalist group Greenpeace took the U.K. government to court over what it sees as Britain's failure to protect coral beds, whales, dolphins and other marine life from the effects of oil and gas exploration. Nigel Plemming QC, representing Greenpeace, told London's High Court that the government had failed to apply the European Union Habitats Directive to oil and gas exploration in the relatively deep waters of the Atlantic Frontier, where oil companies believe large new oil reserves are waiting to be tapped. He said that the Department of Trade and Industry is under a legal duty to apply the EU Directive even though the Atlantic Frontier, on the edge of U.K.'s Continental Shelf, lay beyond British territorial waters.