Roger Laville
- Called: 2015 (qualified as a solicitor 2002)
- rogerlaville@fivepaper.com
Profile
Roger is a member of the Commercial Team and specialises in finance and insolvency.
Before being called to the Bar in 2015, Roger was a solicitor at Addleshaw Goddard and Matthew Arnold & Baldwin (now Dentons UKME), where he was a partner in the banking and finance litigation team. His finance and insolvency practice encompassed working for all the major banks, as well as specialist lenders, and insolvency practitioners from leading firms.
Roger is thoroughly familiar with the legal problems that commonly arise in an insolvency or banking context. Fraud, dishonesty and breach of duty by directors are a regular feature of the cases Roger works on, sometimes necessitating injunctive relief, and many involve cross-border inter-jurisdictional issues.
Having worked as a solicitor, Roger knows the importance of giving clients clear pragmatic advice that enables them to take properly informed decisions, and of being easy to contact and ready to talk through problems informally. He is also fully familiar with the commercial and reputational factors which corporate clients must take into account, as well as the regulatory framework within which financial services firms operate. He especially relishes cases which throw up seemingly intractable problems, or that require imaginative analysis to identify a solution.
Roger sat on the Bar Council money-laundering working group in 2016 and 2017.
Description of Practice
Banking and Finance
Roger has for many years dealt with a wide variety of personal, business and corporate banking disputes including:
- Security and guarantee disputes, including undue influence and misrepresentation allegations
- Customer fraud
- Consumer credit and financial services regulation and regulatory investigations
- Breach of mandate
- Invoice discounting and factoring
- Credit reference claims
- Investment mis-selling
- Enforcement
- Professional negligence claims
Restructuring/Insolvency (personal and corporate)
Since qualifying as a solicitor in 2002 Roger has acted for banks, insolvency practitioners and company directors involved in insolvency disputes, from small procedural applications to hard-fought trials:
- Administrations, receivership (including under the Law of Property Act 1925), liquidations and bankruptcy
- Misfeasance by directors
- Petitions
- Commercial trusts in insolvency
- Private examinations
- Preferences, transactions at an undervalue, transactions defrauding creditors, wrongful trading, unlawful floating charges
- Phoenix trading
- Officeholder remuneration and expenses
- Insolvent partnerships
- Disputed proofs of debt
Companies and Partnerships
- Unfair prejudice petitions and shareholder disputes
- Breach of fiduciary duties
- Partnership disputes
- Share capital and unlawful dividends
- Company charges (including late registration applications)
- Restoration to the register of companies and its consequences
- Rectification of the register and removing documents from the register
Property Finance
- The priority of interests in land, in particular involving bank security
- Mortgage and conveyancing fraud
- Enforcement of money judgments over land
- Law of Property Act receivers (including injunctions to prevent sales by receivers)
- Professional negligence, claims against valuers and solicitors
Civil Fraud
Roger has acted in freezing injunction applications, both for applicants and respondents. He also has experience of search orders, including as a supervising solicitor.
Proceeds of Crime and Money Laundering
Roger advises and represents both banks and insolvency practitioners in relation to disputes arising from customer accounts and insolvent estates containing the proceeds of crime or subject to restraint or confiscation orders.
Recent experience
Examples of recent matters in which Roger has advised or acted include:
- Acting for the successful claimant in two multi-million dollar claims to enforce corporate and personal guarantees given in respect of Indian coal fired power station projects and involving the impact in England of Indian liquidation proceedings;
- Acting for a representative of a class of traders in currency derivatives in ongoing proceedings to determine the existence and extent of the traders’ proprietary interests in funds held in the segregated and non-segregated accounts of the trading platform provider, which is in compulsory liquidation;
- Acting for an Indian commercial lender in a claim under a guarantee, which supported the acquisition of a Spanish company, said to have been vitiated by Indian exchange control legislation;
- Acting for connected offshore companies which invested in ground rent portfolios and the individual representatives of those companies in a dispute with their finance brokers concerning whether the threshold conditions for fees had been satisfied and the extent of restitutionary liability of the owners;
- Hardy Exploration & Production (India) Inc v Government of India [2018] EWHC 1916 (Comm). Advising the India Infrastructure Finance Company about attempts to enforce a £70 million Malaysian arbitration award by attaching it to payments due from the lender to the Government of India under a guarantee scheme;
- Obtaining a High Court injunction to freeze a sum of several hundred thousand pounds in a company’s bank account to prevent one of its directors from allegedly misappropriating the money;
- John Morris v Royal Bank of Scotland plc (3 July 2015, Norris J). The assignment of an alleged £11 million claim against the Bank from the Bank’s customer to the customer’s director was void because of a clause prohibiting assignment in the Bank’s fixed and floating charge debenture (as a solicitor);
- Obadare v Barton Bridging Capital Ltd [2013] EWCA Civ 1096. The Court of Appeal held that an action was not “pending” in the short period between being struck out and an appeal being issued, and therefore could not be protected on the Land Register as a pending land action (as a solicitor);
- Gatt v Barclays Bank Plc [2013] EWHC 2, the first reported decision about a bank’s obligations in contract, negligence and defamation when providing customer information to credit reference agencies (as a solicitor);
- SerVaas Incorporated v Rafidain Bank [2010] All ER (D) 201. Acting for a US corporation against the Republic of Iraq in a claim to enforce a judgment debt of around US$40 million which arose before the first gulf war, involving issues of insolvency, the Iraq sanctions regime and the State Immunity Act 1978 (as a solicitor).
Publications
“Enforcing Judgments Against Pension Assets: Reappraising Blight v Brewster”, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law, January 2018.
“Mistaken Release of Security: a New Avenue to Altering the Land Register”, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law, November 2017.
“Bankers Take Note: How the Tracing Remedy has Become More Complex”, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law, December 2015.
“Freezing Orders and the Corporate Veil”, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law, October 2013.
“Treading on Eggshells: Mental Incapacity Issues in Bankruptcy”, Recovery Magazine, December 2012.
“Open Justice at the FOS”, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law October 2012.
“Unlawful Loans to Company Directors and Constructive Trusts”, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law March 2012.
“The Bonfire of the Charities – Winding up Unregistered Entities”, Insolvency Intelligence March 2011. Written with Derek Francis of Terra Firma Chambers.
“Insolvency and International Criminal Asset Recovery”, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law February 2011.
“Lindsay v O’Loughnane: Outflanking the Insolvency Process”, Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law January 2011.
“Cross-Border Transaction Avoidance: Rubin v Eurofinance SA”, Insolvency Intelligence November 2010. Written with Sharif Shivji of 4 Stone Buildings.
Professional Memberships
Roger is a member of the Chancery Bar Association and the Commercial Bar Association.