RUSSIAN billionaire Roman Abramovich has secured an order that will see the Government of Jersey pay his legal costs – but the obligarch’s attempt to obtain the more punitive remedy of indemnity costs has been rejected.
In a recently published Royal Court judgment, Commissioner Alan Binnington ruled that Mr Abramovich should recover his costs on the standard basis for both a February 2025 hearing before the Master of the Royal Court and a later appeal.
The case concerns Mr Abramovich’s attempt to amend his legal claim against the government to include further allegations, including conspiracy and bad faith.
Permission for those amendments was intially refused, but that decision was overturned on appeal in September last year.
One of the central issues on appeal was the later revelation that Mr Abramovich’s personal data had been “purged” from a government server – a fact which only emerged after the Master’s ruling.
Last year, the government admitted that its email-archiving system was purged in 2022 to delete data from before March 2020.
The court accepted that this development “was sufficient to tilt the balance in favour of allowing a pleading of bad faith”. It also noted that the circumstances of the purge, and the delay in revealing it, raised issues that “clearly require some explanation”.
Despite this, the Commissioner rejected arguments that the government’s conduct justified indemnity costs – the higher level of legal cost recovery ordered by a court, which are usually awarded when behavior is particuarly unreasonable.
He stressed that the allegations of bad faith “remain unproven” and that it “was not unreasonable” for the government to resist the appeal.
Awarding indemnity costs, he said, would risk “pre-judg[ing]” matters that must ultimately be decided at trial.
Questions surrounding the data purge and disclosure were left for further stages of the proceedings, described by the Commissioner as issues “for another day”.
