Lawsuits involving Greensill Capital (UK) Limited and its directors

analysisOn 29 April 2025 a claim under Part 7 of the Civil Procedure Rules, the standard procedure for civil claims, was filed in the Business List of the High Court as BL-2025-000562, Greensill Capital (UK) Limited (in administration) v Greensill and others. It is listed as a claim for breach of fiduciary duty, the duties of loyalty and good faith owed to a company, against seven defendants: Alexander (Lex) Greensill, Sean Hanafin, Divya Eapen, Alastair Eadie, Neil Garrod, Jonathan Lane and Bartholomeus Ras. A court docket summary and a press report (April 2025) describe it as a claim brought by the company's administrators against former directors. The 2019 annual report of GCUK names Alexander Greensill, William Crothers, Alastair Eadie, Bartholomeus Ras, Neil Garrod and Sean Robson-Hanafin as its directors and Jonathan Lane as company secretary, and forms filed at Companies House on 16 March 2021 recorded the end of Divya Eapen's GCUK directorship with effect from 12 February 2021. The claim is the company's allegation against the defendants: its particulars, the sums claimed and any defences are not in the record, no hearing or judgment was found, and no response by the defendants was found. The joint administrators' progress report for 8 March to 7 September 2026 says that their investigations in respect of former directors are ongoing and lists claims against GCUK's former directors among continuing work, giving no further details so as not to prejudice their position. ^{1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8}

analysisOn 15–16 March 2021 Bluestone Resources Inc., Bluestone Coal Sales Corporation, Blackstone Energy, Ltd., James C. Justice II, Cathy L. Justice and James C. Justice III sued GCUK, Lex Greensill and Roland Hartley-Urquhart in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (1:21-cv-02253, Judge Jesse M. Furman) in connection with the financing GCUK had provided to the Bluestone coal businesses. They sought direct, consequential and punitive damages for breach of contract, breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, fraud, breach of fiduciary duties, aiding and abetting those breaches and civil conspiracy. The complaint described Lex Greensill as co-founder and former chief executive of GCUK, who visited the plaintiffs in West Virginia in April 2019 and supported and approved the 2018 financing discussions, and Roland Hartley-Urquhart as its former Vice Chairman and the plaintiffs' main contact from May 2018. It claimed against both individuals for aiding and abetting the company's alleged breaches of its duty of care under West Virginia law and of fiduciary duty under Delaware law, and against all three defendants for civil conspiracy, with amounts left to be determined at trial. None of these allegations was answered or adjudicated. Lex Greensill and GCUK appeared through counsel; Lex Greensill applied in August 2021 to stay the action, and on 2 September 2021 the court granted a temporary stay with the plaintiffs' consent, later ordering that the individual defendants' deadlines, including their time to answer the complaint, be stayed for 90 days if a Chapter 15 stay was granted, Chapter 15 being the US Bankruptcy Code procedure for recognising foreign insolvency proceedings. The case was automatically stayed as to GCUK after U.S. recognition of its administration in September 2021; on 1 July 2022 the court dismissed it following a settlement, with leave to reopen within sixty days if the settlement was not consummated, and on 1–2 August 2022 the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed all claims against all three defendants with prejudice, so that they cannot be brought again, no defendant having filed an answer. The settlement terms are not in the record. ^{1 2}

analysisThe complaint set out the plaintiffs' account of the financing. They alleged that GCUK, as buyer, financed Bluestone under a Customer Agreement of 14 June 2018, a supply chain finance programme under which about $70 million was advanced, and a Receivables Purchase Agreement of 26 September 2018, under which about $780 million was advanced. The latter, they alleged, contemplated purchases of ‘prospective receivables’ not yet generated by Bluestone from a list of ‘prospective buyers’ that included entities that were not and might never become Bluestone customers, and the maximum outstanding purchase price under it rose from $140 million to $785 million under a letter agreement of 29 January 2021. In written evidence to the Treasury Committee in 2021, answering a question about a letter by Sanjeev Gupta, Lex Greensill said that the term ‘prospective receivables’ was unknown to Greensill Capital and did not appear in its client or investor documentation, and that it offered ‘future receivables’ programmes whose nature was disclosed to investors. The complaint further alleged that GCUK advanced $850 million to Bluestone, of which $108 million was paid back as fees and $19 million kept as initial discounts, so that Bluestone received $723 million in cash; that the fees, under no fewer than 16 fee letters dated between 14 June 2018 and 30 November 2020, included $25 million paid on 10 June 2019 for cancelling a December 2018 warrant (a right to acquire shares) over 2.5% of Bluestone Resources, replaced by a warrant over 10% at negligible cost said to be worth at least $100 million; that GCUK also received about $89 million of interest; and that all these payments were funded with money lent by GCUK itself. The defendants filed no answer, and these allegations were not adjudicated before the case was dismissed with prejudice in August 2022 after a settlement whose terms are not in the record. ^{2 3 1}

analysisFor late 2020 and early 2021 the complaint alleged that Bluestone had no choice but to enter a Guarantee and Security Agreement on 3 November 2020 pledging collateral to GCUK and to pay it a $15 million fee, both without new consideration. It alleged that around 9 February 2021 the plaintiffs learned for the first time of GCUK's obligations to funds managed by Credit Suisse relating to Bluestone's financing, when Roland Hartley-Urquhart urgently demanded that Bluestone make an additional payment to those funds, explaining that Greensill Capital had itself failed to make its own required payment to them, in what the plaintiffs described as an attempt to pressure Bluestone into covering the unpaid obligation. According to the complaint, Roland Hartley-Urquhart demanded payment of $300 million on 20 February 2021 and repayment of $850 million on 26 February 2021, each by the end of the third quarter of 2021, and on 1 March 2021 told Bluestone that Greensill Capital had collapsed and would not provide a $5 million advance due by the end of February 2021 under the programme documents. Like the rest of the complaint, these allegations were not answered or adjudicated before the voluntary dismissal with prejudice in August 2022. ^{2 1}

analysisOn 2 August 2019 GCUK and Alexander Greensill issued a libel claim (QB-2019-002773) against Reuters News & Media Limited over an article Reuters published on 7 July 2019 under the headline ‘Exclusive: Greensill issued false statement on bonds sold by metals tycoon Gupta’. The claimants pleaded that it meant they had knowingly given bond market investors and brokers false information in a May 2018 update that the Scottish Government had granted a guarantee, committing a criminal offence of market abuse. Reuters denied that meaning, and the natural and ordinary meaning, what an ordinary reasonable reader would understand the article to say, was ordered to be decided as a preliminary issue before any defence was filed. On 14 May 2020 Nicklin J ([2020] EWHC 1325 (QB)) rejected the claimants' principal submission that the article alleged that GCUK had knowingly issued a false statement and was guilty of market abuse. The judge held that its meaning was that the company, in its May 2018 update, had given bond market investors and brokers false information that the Scottish Government had approved a guarantee related to a hydro plant in Kinlochleven when no such approval had been given, so that there were grounds to investigate how the statement came to be made, whether the company knew it was false and whether it had committed any market abuse offence. The court also held that the ordinary reasonable reader would not understand the article to convey any defamatory allegation against Alexander Greensill personally, because ‘Greensill’ in it would be understood as referring to GCUK, except in one paragraph that referred to Alexander Greensill personally; the judgment describes Alexander Greensill as the founder of the company in 2011 and its chief executive. The ruling decided only what the article meant, not whether it was true. The article itself had reported Greensill's statements that the May 2018 update was based upon information provided by GFG and that Greensill never knowingly issues false statements, and after publication Greensill said the update was neither false nor misleading. According to the National Audit Office's chronology, Greensill dropped the libel suit against Reuters on 27 May 2020; Reuters had not filed a defence, so the article's account was never adjudicated. ^{1 2}

analysisA docket summary for Greensill Capital (UK) Limited v. Tempus Intermediate Holdings, LLC in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (4:17-cv-00127, Judge Lawrence Richard Leonard) records a breach-of-contract action under diversity jurisdiction, the federal courts' jurisdiction over disputes between parties from different states or countries, filed on 13 October 2017 and terminated on 17 September 2018. Federal Judicial Center case data attached to the docket code the case as disposed of by a judgment on a motion before trial in favour of the plaintiff, GCUK, with the defendants unrepresented (pro se). The record is a statistical docket summary only: the contract in dispute, the judgment and any amount awarded are not in it, the amount fields carry the database's top code, and the data provider notes that its matching of this data to dockets cannot be guaranteed. The summary gives 30 September 2020, about two years after the termination, as the date of the last known filing in the case, without showing what was filed or whether any amount was recovered. ¹

analysisIn Australia, on 10 June 2021 the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia (Davies, Moshinsky and Colvin JJ, [2021] FCAFC 99) dismissed, with costs, the appeal by Peter Greensill Family Co Pty Ltd as trustee for the Peter Greensill Family Trust against Thawley J's decision in [2020] FCA 559 in its dispute with the Commissioner of Taxation. The trustee had sold property that was not taxable Australian property and distributed the capital gain to a beneficiary of the trust; the courts rejected the trustee's contention that s 855-10 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 required that gain to be disregarded in assessing the trustee. ²