Enforcing US bankruptcy order

Rubin and another v Eurofinance SA and others [2010] EWCA Civ 895

The respondents ran a scheme (Ward LJ said he was tempted to call it a scam) in which they sold vouchers to retailers offering a full refund of the purchase price of goods to those shoppers who could pass memory and comprehension test three years later. The scheme had been placed into insolvency in the US after consumer protection officials intervened. US judgments were made for the purposes of the collective enforcement regime of the bankruptcy proceedings and as such were governed by the particular rules of private international law relating to bankruptcy rather than to the ordinary private international law rules preventing enforcement of judgments where defendants were not subject to the foreign court’s jurisdiction. Enforcement of the US judgments did not require the court to do anything that it could not have done in similar circumstances in a domestic context. The US court action was a foreign name proceeding in which the receivers had been duly authorised. Accordingly they must be recognised as foreign representatives and the orders made by the US court would be enforced against the respondents.