Liquidator breached undertaking to court
The liquidator of companies connected with former double bankrupt Dave Henderson breached an undertaking to the court, a judgement has found.
However, since the breach was inadvertent, no remedy or costs were awarded.
Henderson, who is one of a raft of defendants being sued by Auckland liquidator Robert Walker over the collapse of the Property Ventures Ltd (PVL) group, asked the High Court to hold Walker in contempt for disclosing personal information from Henderson’s laptop.
Walker obtained the information after police unlawfully seized the laptop in Christchurch in 2011.
The High Court gave Walker access to the laptop’s data in 2013 on an undertaking by Walker to not disclose irrelevant or privileged information.
The liquidator then provided the data to his solicitors who last year provided flash drives of the laptop’s contents (over 840,000 documents) to all the defendants in the court action by Walker over the group collapse.
Only two of the defendants – including Daniel Godden, a former employee of the PVL group – looked at the documents.
Walker, in his evidence, claimed Godden was a close associate of Henderson and had passed on the information to another Henderson associate, Christchurch businessman Ian Hyndman.
Walker said Hyndman intended to use the material in his own legal action against the liquidator.
Henderson accepted Walker’s breach was not wilful or deliberate but the fault of his lawyers.
Justice Lang said there could be no dispute Walker had disclosed the material in breach of an undertaking and was therefore in contempt of court.
Justice Lang said he accepted Henderson had been guilty of a significant delay in bringing the contempt application and that Walker’s solicitors had done everything they could to remedy the breach.
‘‘I place significance on the fact that Mr Walker has known from the outset . . . that Mr Henderson was insisting that the material downloaded from the laptop included a large amount of personal and irrelevant material.
‘‘Mr Walker should have been especially vigilant to ensure no breach occurred.
‘‘However given the circumstances in which the breach occurred, the steps taken to remedy it and Mr Henderson’s delay in bringing the present application I make no further order.
‘‘It follows that there will be no order for costs,’’ Justice Lang said.