ABC Corporate Bonds Update - October 2018

Investors have been waiting for updates on the case in the UAE, which we are informed is now entering the final stage.

Firstly, investors need to be aware that the court process is very different to that in the UK – as such there is not an adversarial defence and prosecution position in court until the very end. So what has been happening is that our team has submitted its court bundle and the defendants have had the opportunity to highlight issues and provide data to show if and why what we are saying is wrong. This results in a slow version of an adversarial process. 

There have been a few “rounds” of this recently (where the defendant has asked us to evidence certain points of our case) and then a third party “expert witness” was called to cast an independent view and write a report to the judge.

This has been processed and now we are expecting that the final documents are put forward for consideration by a judge, including reports from both the Office of Public Prosecutions and the expert witness.

There has been a lot of work for our legal team, answering queries from the defendant’s legal team, but the case now would appear to be complete.

From this point, we are informed that the UAE courts are normally much faster than the UK courts due to the work already done by the Office of Public Prosecutions – we highlight that this is a significant criminal case and whilst we are aware that many investors have been frustrated with the process taking time, good progress is being made and we think things are actually proceeding faster than they might in a UK criminal case.