Fraud & Asset Recovery

If you suspect assets that belong to you or your company are at risk of being disposed of, time is critical, and the best course of action is often urgent legal intervention to protect what is yours. If assets have already been disposed of, we know how worrying and stressful this can be and we can work with you to put you in the best possible legal position to secure your property.

How can we help you?

Where asset recovery is a risk, our expert commercial property team can act quickly to bring proceedings that prevent the asset from being disposed of or lost. We can bring urgent injunctive proceedings to freeze assets and/or an order to prohibit the defendant from doing certain acts.

We are instructed, often on an urgent basis, to implement a legal strategy to prevent and remedy the misappropriation of assets either belonging to a company or an individual. Such a strategy may include obtaining:

• Freezing orders
• Prohibition orders
• Search and disclosure orders
• Asset tracing and recovery
• Advice on proceeds of crime
• Misappropriation of company funds
• Enforcement action for creditors against debtors who have taken deliberate steps to conceal or dissipate their assets

Where possible, we seek pre-emptive relief to locate and freeze assets before them being disposed of and this means we often work on urgent cases and can deploy a team of people to each case to respond effectively within tight timescales.

Recent Successes:

We acted for an individual (A) against another individual (B). B held a significant sum of money on trust for A in an account. B withdrew this sum without the permission of A for their use. We successfully obtained a freezing order against B’s accounts and the return of the majority of the money taken. B was ordered to re-pay the remaining sum owed and all of A’s legal costs.

We acted for a company and their director (Director A) misappropriated company funds. We issued a claim against Director A. Ultimately, we entered into successful negotiations with Director A to secure the return of company property and company funds and ensured that all his ties with the company were severed, which included negotiating a shareholder agreement at a favourable price to our client.

We acted for an individual where solicitors had relied upon fraudulent documents to transfer the sale of our client’s property without the requisite authority. We were able to successfully negotiate a settlement agreement with the bank in the client’s favour.

We acted for a company whose long history was covered with various fraudulent elements from the misappropriation of company funds to false Company House filings and appointments. At the centre was a property worth millions of pounds, which our client sought to protect for the good of the local community. We conducted in-depth investigations into the company and devised a strategy to move forward whilst defending and successfully settling claims against other interested parties.