Originally from Dispute Resolution Journal

This article was presented at an international arbitration conference on interim relief and mass claims sponsored by the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution in Brussels on May 28, 2003.

We are here to round up this interesting session with a good debate. In this we have been well served by speakers Jim Castello and Yves Derains. We have not only had lucid argument from each of them but also a cogently argued paper from Jim favouring arbitral interim relief ex parte, and a splendidly challenging paper against, written in Yves’ inimitable style.

Now, as it happens, I have come hot foot from London with direct and recent experience of ex parte interim relief. It concerned my wife, who is a doctor and serves as a National Health Service Consultant in a major London teaching hospital. Three or four weeks ago, she discovered, to her surprise and everybody else’s, that her entire hospital salary for several years had not been paid to her but to an electrician in Paphos, Cyprus, who, it appears, has been living for the same several years in some luxury! When asked for an explanation of how this Cypriot electrician came to be in receipt of my wife’s salary, the hospital stated, somewhat blandly, that the “circumstances were unusual.” The bank, one of the major clearing banks in the UK, stated with greater blandness, “It was a fluke!”

To try and remedy this unfortunate situation, my wife first obtained disclosure orders against all the banks that held accounts where her salary had been wrongly deposited and thereafter transferred to other bank accounts. Second, she obtained gag orders against each of the banks that had received disclosure orders. This prevented them from disclosing to their clients that inquiries were being made until after the investigation had been completed. Third, my wife obtained freeze orders against the banks, and the wrongful receiver of her hospital salary, to prevent any movement of the funds out of the disclosed accounts.