Rubin v Euroflnance New Cap Reinsurance v Grant

By its judgment in the joined cases of Rubin v Euroflnance SA and New Cap Reinsurance Corp (in liq) v Grant,1 the Supreme Court re-established that a judgment and order from a foreign court exercising insolvency jurisdiction takes its effect in England, unless statute prescribes the answer, according to the ordinary common law on the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. There is no special common law rule or treatment for judgments given in the course of insolvency proceedings, even where the foreign court sits and supervises the administration at the place where the insolvent entity had its centre of main interests. It followed that a judgment from the US Bankruptcy Court, ordering the former directors of an insolvent entity to repay large sums which they should not have received was not enforceable in England unless the persons against whom the judgment was given had been present in the US when the proceedings were begun, or had submitted to the jurisdiction of the US court: in Rubin, neither condition was satisfied, and that was that. To the extent that a different answer to the question was liable to be derived from the judgment of the Privy Council in Cambridge Gas Transportation Corp v Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors of Navigator Holdings Plc,2 then it should not have been, for that decision was wrong.3 The result was that the decision of the Court of Appeal in Rubin v Euroflnance SA 4 was reversed, but that in New Cap Reinsurance Corp v Grant 5 was affirmed, though not on the basis on which the Court of Appeal had arrived at it.6 It follows that the proposition that the law on foreign judgments in matters of insolvency is different from the general law of foreign judgments has, ostensibly, been rejected.