Stephen Paget-Brown, Senior Consultant and former Head of Dispute Resolution, shares his thoughts on his experience in acting in civil fraud cases.

As a commercial litigator you get to see the worst side of human behaviour. And it is usually money that drives bad behaviour. So whether the economy is going up, or down, and regardless of what is in vogue in any particular decade, the one constant is that there is always fraud.

The principal difference between now and when I started my career as a lawyer is that the world has got more complex, and frauds are often facilitated now through the use of technology. The victims turn to lawyers to seek to recoup their losses. The more complex the fraud, the better the law firm you need.

We have been fortunate at Travers Smith to have dealt with a considerable number of fraud cases, some of them the biggest in their day in terms of money, complexity and profile. The first big one after I joined Travers Smith in 1987 was the theft of around £300 million by Robert Maxwell from the Mirror Group pension fund. In the end, after a massive effort and a complex series of cases, we succeeded in recouping nearly all of the losses. Since then we have handled many more fraud cases. These have included fairly straightforward "cooking the books" type frauds, email diversion of funds scams, employee/director thefts, complex webs of offshore companies set up to facilitate the laundering of criminal money, falsification of records to disguise the true facts, and plenty more besides. It all tends to make one rather cynical about the essential honesty of people in business. But you have to remember that we get to see the worst of the worst and our experiences are not reflective of what goes on in business generally.

Fraud cases are often challenging, but also interesting, and sometimes even exciting. I think one reason is that you have to deploy not just legal skills, but also the skills of a detective. And when you uncover a key that enables you to unlock the fraud, or prove it, it is very satisfying. But we don't just act for the victims of fraud. We have also handled cases where our client is accused of fraud. There are two particular cases recently that spring to mind. First, defending Jóhannes Jóhannsson who was accused of dishonestly deceiving the SFO in relation to the dealings between Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz on the one hand and Kaupthing on the other, the allegation being that this led to the Tchenguiz brothers’ well-publicised arrests. Secondly, an individual client who has been accused by Kazakh Bank BTA of a massive fraud in collusion with international fugitive Mukhtar Ablyazov. This case has involved worldwide litigation, a murder, freezing injunctions, New York proceedings in which an associate of Donald Trump is a defendant and lots more.

In both of these cases we were advising and representing individuals with impeccable reputations who got innocently bound up in cases where the most extreme and damaging allegations were being made against them. The lawyer's role in such cases extends beyond just fighting the legal case. You become a confidante, a counsellor, a sounding board, a friend. And because the client is a real person, rather than a faceless corporation, you feel every setback and obstacle in a more visceral way, and you fight all the harder for your client, because you know the fight is about a whole lot more than just money. It is about reputations, family, friends, career, financial security and potential bankruptcy.

In conversation

Stephen
Paget-Brown
Senior Consultant

"The lawyer's role extends beyond just fighting the legal case. You become a confidante, a counsellor, a sounding board, a friend."