Feature

Authorised push payment fraud (APP fraud) is a form of fraud where the victim is induced to initiate a fraudulent transaction. Despite this type of fraud costing customers nearly £1/2bn a year, English law does not offer a clear and co-ordinated response. This article examines the implications of the recent cases including I.F.T S.A.L Offshore v Barclays Bank PLC, Singularis Holdings Ltd v Daiwa Capital Markets Europe Ltd and Philipp v Barclays Bank UK Plc, in order to identify the prospects for defrauded customers seeking to recover damages against the banks through whom their funds were paid away.

In this article, the authors explain the Law Commission’s provisional proposals for legislative reform to provide that certain trade documents in electronic form have the same effect as paper trade documents.

In this article the authors review the current status of the various “legislative fixes” for dealing with agreements which refer to USD LIBOR but which cannot be actively amended to remove those references before the benchmark ceases to exist.

In this article the author highlights cases where third-party activists seek to harness the securities markets through exploitation of investment manager ESG policies, to weaponise their own political agendas. In circumstances where the information they disseminate (before and after trades) is erroneous, biased, or demonstrably influenced by material interest, he argues the need for urgent regulatory focus to prevent market manipulation and protect market integrity.

In this article, we discuss that in relation to making sustainability disclosures, if companies are able to unpick and rationalise the alphabet soup of standards, requirements and frameworks, many will find a set that suits their particular business model or industry. However, as the number of different reporting frameworks increases this is fostering confusion, lack of comparability and reporting fatigue. Greater global convergence may help to alleviate these issues.

In this article Professor Suzanne Rab responds to the Financial Market Law Commission’s clarion call to consider key competition issues arising from a move to Risk Free Rates (RFR) or similar. She identifies challenges for the competition law regulation of banking benchmarking practices that need to be addressed.

Two recent circuit commercial court decisions have considered the scope of a Payment Service Provider’s duty of care to its customer when executing payment instructions (Quincecare duty) in the contexts of identity fraud: Hamblin v World First Limited [2020] EWHC 2383 (Comm) and authorised push payment fraud: Philipp v Barclays Bank UK Plc [2021] EWHC 10 (Comm). This article speculates in the light of these two decisions whether, where scheme funds lent under the Coronavirus Bounce Back Loan Scheme have been misapplied, the British Business Bank could escape liability under the Scheme guarantee on the grounds that the lender has breached its Quincecare duty.

In this article the authors consider a parent bank’s liability for the torts of its subsidiary in light of the Supreme Court decision in Okpabi v Royal Dutch Shell [2021] UKSC 3.

In this article, the authors consider some of the key international developments in Q4 2020 relating to LIBOR transition. They conclude that parties should exercise significant caution before signing up to the ISDA 2020 IBOR Fallbacks Protocol.

This article summarises the post-Brexit position regarding inbound and outbound recognition of insolvency and restructuring proceedings between the UK and the EU.