Leigh Day claims £105m costs for Trafigura litigation
Leigh Day & Co has claimed £105m in costs against Trafigura, the company that, it is alleged, was responsible for the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast.
Sean Wilken
Trafigura’s counsel Sean Wilken QC of 39 Essex Street yesterday told the High Court that the fees were “staggeringly high”.
He said: “I’m told that this is one of the largest, if not the largest, costs claims in legal history.”
Trafigura settled the £100m claim brought by Leigh Day on behalf of 30,000 Ivory Coast residents who, it was alleged, suffered varying degrees of illness because of the waste.
Trafigura, it was claimed, should be held responsible for the disaster because it hired the independent contractor that dumped the toxic waste around Ivory Coast capital Abidjan.
Trafigura did not concede liability in the case although it did agree to pay 31,000 claimants compensation of around £1,000 each. The payout amounted to a total of around £30m. The original claim was for £100m, which would have given the claimants around £3,000 each.
It has since emerged that only 12,250 claimants have cashed their compensation cheques.
Wilken told the court: “So we say this court is faced with groundbreaking claims of English lawyers in circumstances where the Ivorian claimants haven’t been paid in full the compensation which was supposedly the rationale of this litigation.
“Bluntly, we’d like to know what happened to the money we paid to settle these claims.”
Leigh Day, which worked on a conditional fee agreement putting more than £10m of its own money at risk, instructed a plethora of leading barristers on the case, including 39 Essex Street’s Robert Jay QC, Essex Court’s Joe Smouha QC, and Doughty Street’s Richard Hermer and Alison Gerry.
Macfarlanes partner Simon Nurney, acting for Trafigura, instructed 39 Essex Street’s Edwin Glasgow QC and Rohan Pershad alongside Wilken to defend the claim.
The defence’s counsel brought in Henderson Chambers’ Charles Gibson QC to negotiate the settlement agreement. It is the first time that Henderson Chambers has worked with 39 Essex Street.
Readers' comments (9)
City Gent | 12-May-2010 4:42 pm
£105m? This is Greed with a capital G, and shows what a mockery of any remotely fair justice system CFA's have become.
So if the claim succeeds Leigh Day will receive 100,000 times as much as any of their clients? It would seem that their much vaunted concern for the victims of society is underpinned by some good, old-fashioned avarice.
The Costs Judge should point out that an award of £1,000 would be within the small claims track, and limit them to the costs appropriate to that track!
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Anonymous | 13-May-2010 8:17 am
Good luck and why not?
As I remember a magic circle firm spent £50m of creditors money running a "hopeless and grotesque" claim agianst the Bank of England, but that's OK because their magic circle.
I hope they get the lot.
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Realist | 13-May-2010 9:27 am
City Gent, you are obviously a fule, or an idiot (wouldn't surprise me), or someone from the Lawyer seeding the posts. Assuming the former, I can't think of many large scale collective actions where every individual claimant got more than the law firm that in Leigh Day's case stuck their necks out and tangled with a very litigious firm which had a lot to lose.
They certainly didn't do this for the cash, as for ages it was pretty apparent it all might come to naught.
And as Trafigura retain Mssrs Carter Ruck, some of the most expensive in the business, who fire off faxes like you or I take breaths, I'm not surprised the cost have been huge. LD have been dealing with huge numbers of claimants spread across a country with poor comms and travel for most people, as well as fighting a huge transnational with vast amounts of cash, some of which was spent trying to spend LD out of the fight.
So, let's go over that greed argument again:
Huge transnational farms out disposal of hideous toxic trash to untrustworthy local trader (don't worry, Lawyer, all this is libel-proof), then claims zero knowledge of actions or liability, then head of local awful firm goes to jail for actions, and huge transnational, after much fighting, hands over millions in a non-settlement without admitting liability. Then, er, it seems to do it again.
Hmm. You know, if I were shareholder in Trafigura I'd be most peeved about shelling out 100s of millions in non-settlements that my company's no liable for unless, er, there might be a good reason to do so.
Hey ho!
Well done Leigh Day.
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Anonymous | 13-May-2010 9:36 am
It must be noted that Leigh Day put £10 million of its own money at risk.
£105 million is not what they will earn either. You need to take off disbursements and VAT.
They took a risk and funded the case with their own money so in my opnion fully derserve the rewards they now stand to achieve.
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Youcanthandlethetruth | 13-May-2010 9:51 am
£50m running a claim against the BoE. Hmm, no, that was Lovells, who are very definitely not magic circle. The Magic circle firm (Freshfields) was the one defending the BoE, and they won.
Also, to be fair to Lovells, there was a lot more money (potentially) at stake in the BCCI litigation. To claim £105m costs on a case that was only ever worth a max of £100m (and no doubt that was itself a hopelessly optimistic overstatement) is outrageous. Let them hang (whoever they are).
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michael kain of kain knight | 13-May-2010 11:27 am
It is all well and good complaining but if Litigators took a more pragmatic approach such admitting liabilty then costs and success fess could be limited
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Anonymous | 14-May-2010 11:56 am
I am no longer at Leigh Day and Co. However, having worked on this case and having been to the Ivory Coast on several occasions, I can honestly say that Leigh Day deserves to claim for such amount of costs. None of you know the issues faced whilst you are in IC, trying to obtain witness statements from the victims. The Leigh Day staff have worked Day and Night on this case and I welcome the costs decision. If Trafigura had wanted, they could have settled way early in the litigation and could have avoided massive bills but Well Done Indeed Leigh Day!
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Anonymous | 14-May-2010 2:20 pm
The success fee alone would place them 64th in last year's Lawyer 200 table. Equal with Davies Arnold Cooper.
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John Flood | 19-May-2010 6:30 pm
While I hate CFAs and can't wait to see them abolished, I can't help feeling in this case it's justified. Trafigura's behaviour over the past years has been blatantly adversarial and combative. They have antagonised everyone involved: the media, the plaintiffs, Parliament. At least they assisted in making it harder to get super-injunctions.
Weren't the Woolf reforms supposed to direct the parties' minds towards settlement--earlier than later? A lesson lost on the defendants.
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