Ali Tabari successfully represents respondent in Re SKS Justa & Co Ltd [2025] EWHC 2120 (Ch)

Ali Tabari represented the successful respondent in Re SKS Justa & Co Ltd [2025] EWHC 2120 (Ch), an application by the applicants to set aside two statutory demands (“SDs”). The case concerned the fall-out from the sale of an accountancy practice, the dispute centring on the availability and extent of the payment of deferred consideration. The respondent had served SDs on the two purchasers, who then raised a welter of disputes in order to divert the dispute from the insolvency court to a Part 7 Claim. After a heavily contested hearing, Deputy ICCJ Arumugam undertook a common-sense analysis of the applicants’ disputes, and found none of them to be genuine disputes on substantial grounds; indeed, his view was that, even without conducting a mini-trial, they flew in the face of the contemporaneous evidence.

The decision is a good reminder for practitioners on either side of such cases that simply raising factual or legal arguments will not be enough to see off a SD, or a contested petition. The Court is well able to dismiss such disputes if they are contradicted by a plain and sensible reading of the evidence, particularly the documents created contemporaneously, or if their timing gives the strong appearance that they are contrived.

Ali was instructed by Kuljeet Sandhu and Amy Kelly of Askews Legal.