The High Court has held that a bank breached an equitable duty of confidence by misusing confidential information supplied by a corporate customer. This approach was initially made through a third party acting on behalf of the claimant and a confidentiality agreement was entered into between the third party and the bank.<\/p>\n
The claimant believed that the target was undervalued and provided information which demonstrated this to the bank in support of its loan application. Although some of the information in issue could be derived from public sources, a number of key details could not. Ultimately the negotiations between the claimant and the target were unsuccessful. The defendant bank later acquired the target itself and then sold it for a profit.<\/p>\n
The court found that some of the information received by the bank had the necessary quality of confidence, and that the bank had breached its duty of confidentiality by using the information to take advantage of the acquisition opportunity.<\/p>\n
This is a high profile case, with huge costs involved and a unique and “factually tortuous” background. It provides a useful reminder to practitioners of the ability of commercial parties to rely on an equitable duty of confidence in the absence of a contract, and a possible approach to quantifying damages in the event of breach.(CF Partners (UK) LLP v Barclays Bank plc and another [2014] EWHC 3049)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The High Court has held that a bank breached an equitable duty of confidence by misusing confidential information supplied by a corporate customer. This approach was initially made through a third party acting on behalf of the claimant and a confidentiality agreement was entered into between the third party and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1492],"tags":[1544,1552,1611,590,846],"class_list":["post-708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corporate","tag-banks","tag-breach-of-confidentiality","tag-confidential-information","tag-corporate","tag-high-court"],"yoast_head":"\n