The case of the day is Salinas v. Astor Asset Management 3 Ltd. [2026] EWCA Civ 940. What an interesting case. Ricardo Salinas Pliego was a “wealthy Mexican businessman.” He was looking to borrow money in 2021, and he was introduced to “Gregory Mitchell” and “Thomas Mellon,” who were supposedly “senior representatives of Astor Capital Fund.” In fact, Mitchell and Mellon were Vladimir Sklarov, one of the defendants, and his associate, Skachkov. Astor entered into an agreement with one of Salinas’s companies to lend $115 million, with Salinas acting as guarantor and offering his shares in another company, Grupo Elektra, as security. The shares were worth $415 million, and the custodians, Weiser and Tavira, apparently transferred the shares to the defendants and sold, yielding about $270 million in value, above the $115 million lent, for Sklarov. The claim was that Sklarov and the other defendants defrauded Salinas by falsely representing that Astor was a “legitimate and honest financial institution connected to the Astor family,” when in fact the defendants were “creatures of Mr Sklarov set up pursuant to a fraudulent scheme to expropriate the shares.” The defendants argued that the contract permitted them to “rehypothecate” the shares and denied any fraud.

Salinas sought summary judgment, and the judge, without deciding, suggested that the case for fraud was “apparently strong and substantial, perhaps unanswerable.”

But even a plaintiff with a very strong claim can screw it up. Grupo Elektra had hired Black Cube, a litigation support and investigation firm, to obtain evidence. Black Cube targeted “X,” a solicitor for the defendants and a newly promoted partner of a law firm, and the judge found that “the claimants intended or expected” to seek information from X via “unethical conduct.” Black Cube’s “operator”, using the name “Marco Ortelli,” posed as the representative of a potential new client seeking representation in an arbitration against the government of the UAE. X was induced to travel to Amsterdam to meet with “Ortelli,” who persuaded X to drink more than he usually did. X then disclosed confidential information that didn’t end up in evidence, but that did paint “a clear picture of the impact of the litigation on Mr Sklarov, including the severe impact of the freezing orders obtained by the claimants,” and that “would have been of considerable (albeit unquantifiable) value to the claimants in deciding their tactics in the litigation with an understanding of where pressure could most usefully be applied. It was also information which, once learned, could not be unlearned.” X, unsurprisingly, faces disciplinary proceedings and “professional ruin.” It was the claimants and not the respondents who referred him for discipline, which is odd.

In today’s decision, the court held that the claimants’ conduct amounted to an abuse of process. ” The main excuse was that X was wrong to disclose the information. That did not impress the court:

It makes no difference that the solicitor, X, was obviously at fault in revealing information that he should not have revealed. That was the whole object of the Black Cube operation, which the claimants sanctioned and of which they now seek to take the benefit. It is absurd for the claimants to submit, as they submitted forcefully before the Deputy Judge and rather more faintly in this court, that their conduct should not be regarded as abusive because the operation should have been unsuccessful—in Mr Wardell’s words, that ‘there should have been a nil return’. The claimants were paying millions of pounds for Black Cube’s expertise in extracting information which should not have been available to them for use in the litigation. They expected and intended to benefit from such information, not to be told that the operation had been unsuccessful and there had been a ‘nil return’.

The harder question was what to do about it, given the strong claim for fraud. The court agreed that the claimant should not be allowed to seek summary judgment, but should its claim be struck out altogether? No, the court said, but merely disallowing a summary judgment application was insufficient given the gravity of the wrongdoing. So the court discharged the freezing order. That may turn out to be hugely important for obvious reasons.

The case reminds me of In re Crossen, 450 Mass. 533 (2008). The case was a part of the epic Demoulas lawsuit, a fight among the family members who owned the Market Basket grocery chain that became one of the leading precedents in Massachusetts’s law of fiduciary duty. A well-known Boston lawyer, Crossen, was disbarred after he had gotten involved in a scheme similar in some ways to the scheme in Salinas. He wanted to show that the judge, Maria Lopez, was biased against his clients. He learned that his client had hired a lawyer and two investigators to meet, using aliases, with the judge’s law clerk, on the false pretext of interviewing the clerk for a job. The idea was to get the clerk to say that the clerk, not the judge, had written an adverse decision in the case. And the clerk obliged. Crossen, learning of this, decided to record an interview with the clerk by audio, but because it is illegal in Massachusetts to record someone in secret, Crossen arranged for the clerk’s second “job interview” to take place in New York. Ultimately, Crossen’s clients did not use the information gathered in the motion it made asking the judge to recuse herself. Nevertheless, Crossen and members of his team confronted the clerk, at a third sham job interview, explaining their ruse:

Crossen told the law clerk that he could not control what his clients would do with the information they had; that if the law clerk did not “help him” there would be a “missile” fired “that’s out of my control and it’s off, and I don’t know where it goes and what it ends up doing”; that he, Crossen, needed a “candid conversation” with the law clerk “about what really happened here.”

The law clerk, obviously and understandably upset, spoke with the authorities, and at their request secretly taped his next discussions with Crossen. The law clerk and his counsel, another well-known Boston lawyer, held a press conference exposing the affair, and the Bar Counsel, who prosecutes disciplinary matters in Massachusetts, brought charges against Crossen and others. Crossen was disbarred, though he was not criminally prosecuted.

It seems almost trite to state the lesson of these cases. Don’t lie. Don’t have others lie for you. It is sad to see talented lawyers get this one wrong.