Raja alleges ‘warfare’ as MFS group claims multiply

A new skeleton argument claims former MFS CEO Paresh Raja faces five overlapping proceedings from entities linked to Market Financial Solutions (MFS), while London Bridging has reduced its summary judgment application by around £191m.

The argument adds that there has been no effort to coordinate proceedings, declaring that there has been a degree of “internecine warfare”, which was intended to harass Raja with “increasingly ‘urgent’ applications”.

London Bridging Limited (LBL) has applied to amend its summary judgment application from £242,110,079.78 to £50,676,211.03, dropping £191.4m from the summary judgment application. According to Raja’s skeleton, this means LBL is no longer seeking summary judgment on around 79% of the claim value.

LBL’s claim is that Raja, as LBL’s sole director, “caused or allowed monies which LBL held on trust for the Issuer to be wrongly paid to MFSI [Market Financial Solutions International Limited] and MFS GB, which, in turn, is alleged to give rise to a breach of Mr Raja’s duties to LBL”.

MFS claims at least £1.3bn against Raja. The skeleton argument said the claim “appears to be for an indemnity against MFS’s own liabilities to the SPVs, of which LBL is one”, adding that there is common ground between MFS’s and LBL’s claims.

According to the argument, MFS allegedly agrees with Raja’s position that the MFS and LBL claims should be jointly case managed. MFS’s own leading counsel allegedly described the LBL claim as “a subset of the misappropriations that we complain of”.

The argument states that both cases concern “essentially the same alleged breaches of duty, and the same loss” as well as depending on the same witnesses, documents and issues.