Thanks, Simon: service out cases are often more useful than they look on obligations law.

Andrew

Dear Colleagues,

2017 saw three ‘anchor defendant’ cases before the High Court involving tort claims against a UK parent corporation in respect of the activities of its overseas subsidiary. The claimants sought leave to serve the subsidiary out of the jurisdiction under the ‘necessary and proper party’ gateway for service out of the jurisdiction in paragraph 3.1 of Practice Direction 6B in the Civil Procedure Rules (“CPR”). In two cases, AAA v Unilever and Okpabi v Shell, leave was refused but was granted in the third case, Vedanta Resources PLC and another v Lungowe. The key issue was whether there was a triable issue against the UK parent corporation. Lungowe involved alleged pollution from toxic emissions from a copper mine in Zambia owned by a Zambian company, KCM, whose ultimate parent company is Vedanta Resources Ltd which is incorporated and domiciled in the UK.

 

The  Supreme Court, [2019] UKSC 20, in which Lord Briggs gave the lead judgment, has upheld the findings at first instance and in the Court of Appeal that there was a triable issue as regards Vedanta on the basis of a plausible case that its involvement in the activities of KCM gave rise to a duty of care to those affected by those activities.

 

There was nothing novel about the negligence claim against a parent company. It all goes back to   Dorset Yacht Co Ltd v Home Office. The question is whether there was a plausible case that the parent company was playing the role of the home office in relation to the wrongs allegedly committed by its subsidiary, in the role of the borstal absconders. The duty would arise from a sufficiently high level of supervision and control of the activities at the mine with sufficient knowledge of the propensity of those activities to cause toxic escapes into the surrounding watercourses. This was a question for Zambian law, which it was agreed followed English tort law. It was a question of fact as to what that level actually was. On the facts, there was sufficient material identified by the judge in support of the view that the claimants’ case was arguable and the judge made no error of law in assessing this issue, so his decision on the negligence claim must stand.

 

The Judge had identified the following evidence as establishing that there was an arguable case that Vedanta owed a duty of care. There was part of the published material, namely a report entitled “Embedding Sustainability” which stressed that the oversight of all Vedanta’s subsidiaries rested with the board of Vedanta itself, and which made particular reference to problems with discharges into water and to the particular problems arising at the Mine. There was the management services agreement between Vedanta and KCM , and a witness statement of Mr Kakengela.

 

Lord Briggs was not so keen on the last two of these, but stated that he regarded [61]  “[t]he published materials in which Vedanta may fairly be said to have asserted its own assumption of responsibility for the maintenance of proper standards of environmental control over the activities of its subsidiaries, and in particular the operations at the Mine, and not merely to have laid down but also implemented those standards by training, monitoring and enforcement, as sufficient on their own to show that it is well arguable that a sufficient level of intervention by Vedanta in the conduct of operations at the Mine may be demonstrable at trial, after full disclosure of the relevant internal documents of Vedanta and KCM, and of communications passing between them.

 

Useful guidance for UK parent companies in multinational mining and extractive industries.

Best wishes,

Simon