I fought the law and the law won (on appeal)

Mr Laport may have been Mr Knowles. He may have been Mr Magill. He may have been Canadian. He may have been Australian. He may have been an American lawyer. He may have been fantastically successful as a lawyer. He may have been quite the property magnate.

Mr Laport/Magill/Knowles may have been a director and secretary of Fidelity Management Limited, which definitely did open an account with a bank.

Mr Laport died in 2005 and a request was made to transfer the funds in the account. Given the above, it is not surprising that consent had to be sought from the Guernsey Financial Intelligence Unit for that transaction, and it is even less surprising that such consent was refused.

Her Majesty’s (now His Majesty’s) Comptroller applied to forfeit the monies in the account through civil forfeiture proceedings.

I appeared at first instance on behalf of HMC, in HMC v Fidelity Management Limited and ors [2025] GRC 004; HMC’s application was unsuccessful, and so the matter was appealed to the Court of Appeal, which overturned the first instance decision.

It’s a cracking read, and I’m not going to spoil your fun. One gets the feeling that the Court of Appeal rather enjoyed this one. Some highlights from the appeal decision –

“…the only reason the suspicion surrounding the Account only surfaced after Mr Laport’s death was because he maintained his fraudulent claim to be Thomas Magill right up to that point. Once that fraud was exposed the Account was frozen in 2007. At that point FML must have known that it would at some point have to produce evidence as to the lawful origin of the funds in the Account. However, rather than assembling and preserving the necessary documentation, Mr Collin’s [sic], who was by that stage FML’s sole director, set about destroying documents, to such an extent that, as appears below, it is now impossible to know where the funds in the Account came from.

“There is tension, to say the least, between the requirement stated in paragraph 99 of the judgment that “it is necessary for the State (HMC) to identify… the criminal offence(s) which it argues did, or must have, occurred and which had generated those funds” and the alternative requirement in paragraph 103 that “HMC should be able to succeed in forfeiting money if, in the particular circumstances of any case, it can be said that whilst no conduct constituting an identifiable criminal offence can be identified, nonetheless, the circumstances are such that there is no plausible explanation but that the funds are the proceeds of some criminal conduct…”

“Although the Lieutenant Bailiff makes reference to Mr Laport’s secretive nature and his narcissistic personality, she makes no finding about the reason why Mr Laport employed a fraudulently obtained passport to open the account. The Judgment leaves open the possibility that Mr Laport was impelled to this course of action by quirks in his personality, and Advocate Davies strongly pressed the Court in submissions that these provided a convincing explanation for his conduct. But we agree with Advocate Rabey that this is not a convincing hypothesis, having regard to the serious risks Mr Laport was running in obtaining the passport by fraud, (not to mention using a forged driving licence when he incorporated FML). Also, if his objective was, as the Lieutenant Bailiff thought, to use the account to make provision for his daughters he must have realised that by using a false identity to open the account, he was storing up trouble for them in the event of his death.”

Have a read.  Go on.