Mark Dawkins and Sheena Buddhdev Quoted in Commercial Dispute Resolution on Yukos Auction-Rigging Case
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Commercial Dispute Resolution has quoted Akin Gump litigation partner Mark Dawkins and senior counsel Sheena Buddhdev in the article “Yukos conspiracy claim fails in the High Court.”
The article reports on a case in which Akin Gump successfully defended Robert Foresman, a vice chairman at UBS Investment Bank, against allegations of auction-rigging in the sale of a Yukos Oil subsidiary. (Click here to learn more.) Foresman and four co-defendants were accused of rigging the 2007 auction of shares in Yukos Finance by providing false competition, with the claimants seeking £23 million for costs and expenses and an additional £12 million in lost value of assets.
Dawkins said having to determine events that took place a dozen years ago made it “quite a complicated case.”
“What was important for all the parties was the way in which witnesses were able to describe their recollection of events and who the judge believed in relation to those descriptions of events,” said Dawkins.
Buddhdev said the claimant had enough evidence to be aware that this outcome was a possibility, yet brought the proceedings anyway. “The vast majority of the documents that were disclosed in these proceedings had been in the claimants’ possession since 2014 in any event and many of those documents in fact were the internal communications that the defendants had had going back to 2007.”
“There was nothing the witnesses said that in any way contradicted what is set out in the documentary record,” Buddhdev continued, noting that the inclusion of “very candid” correspondence with the defendants’ lawyers dating from around 2007 emphasized the fact that “there was nothing in those documents that suggested that there had been any dishonest conduct as they alleged.”
While the case originated with litigation in the Netherlands, Dawkins added, “All the law that was being considered by the English judge was Russian law … and there is interestingly a growing body of English legal decisions that are interpreting and applying Russian law in quite an informative way.”