It is well established that an anti-enforcement injunction is available as an equitable remedy in the English Courts to restrain a party from enforcing a foreign court order or foreign judgment. Relying on those principles, BCLP obtained an anti-enforcement injunction on behalf of its clients to restrain the enforcement of an English Court judgment and order which is understood to be the first reported case of its kind: Federal Government of Nigeria & Anor v Louis Emovbira Williams [2025] EWHC 2217 (Comm).

“Once a judgment is tainted by deceit it is fatally flawed” (Park v CNH Industrial Capital Europe Limited). But can an application to set aside a default judgment allegedly procured by fraud, itself be an abuse of process, vexatious and a collateral attack on a previous judgment of the court? We explore this question in the context of the claimant having previously known about the alleged fraud, in Henshaw J’s judgment of 8 May 2025 in (1) Federal Government of Nigeria; and (2) Attorney General of the Federal Republic of Nigeria v Williams.

The Court of Appeal has handed down its judgment in the case of Prismall v Google UK Ltd and DeepMind Technologies Ltd [2024] EWCA Civ 1516. Finding for Google, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower Court’s decision to strike out the claim, and offered some further guidance on the threshold to be met for a claim to proceed as a representative action under CPR 19.8, particularly in relation to claims for the misuse of private information. The Court of Appeal explained that “a representative class claim for misuse of private information is always going to be very difficult to bring”. This is because the circumstances of individual claimants will affect the determination as to whether any particular claimant has a reasonable expectation of privacy. This will in turn affect whether all members of the represented class can meet the required “same interest” test in order to found a representative action under CPR 19.8 (see our previous article).

The Court of Appeal has clarified the requirements to be satisfied before obtaining a freezing injunction, affirming an attainable merits threshold is to be preferred over a more stringent alternative. Any perceived tilt in favour of prospective applicants, however, is tempered by a heightened emphasis on the requirement for any potential order to be “just and convenient”. In this insight, Rachel Ziegler and Sanjay Lohano examine the Court of Appeal decision in Dos Santos v Unitel S.A., providing practical insights for prospective applicants looking to utilise one of the law’s so-called “nuclear weapons”.