27.05.12
Admin Court declines to quash Warning Notice that relied on privileged material
In R (Ford) v the Financial services Authority and Anor [2012] EWHC 997 (Admin) Burnett J declined to quash a Warning Notice issued by the FsA that had partly relied on privileged material. The claimant stewart Ford had been an executive at the company Keydata Investment services Limited which had gone into administration. The administrators had passed various documents to the FsA. This included documents over which Mr Ford claimed legal privilege. This material was subsequently referred to in the Warning Notice.
Burnett J concluded that the warning notice, without the privileged material, remained a coherent, seamless and powerful document that would have been issued if it had not referred to it. Mr Ford could be sufficiently vindicated by an order that all of the privileged material be redacted from the warning notice. Burnett J drew a distinction between cases where a solicitors' firm had confidential privileged information in relation to a former client it now acted against, and where a solicitor possessed such information in relation to a party that it had not previously represented. In the former an injunction restraining a solicitor from acting would be granted, in the latter an order restraining the use of the confidential information would suffice.
A full copy of the judgment can be found below:-
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