Al Haroun v Kuwait Finance House: contempt order and £8m default judgement set aside despite valid service

A bank found to have been properly served with a contempt application and a subsequent claim has nonetheless had both a £100,000 contempt order and an £8.2m default judgement set aside, in a judgement that also made findings of document forgery against the litigant on the other side.

In Al Haroun v Al Sabah and others [2026] EWHC 1669 (KB), David Quest KC, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, resolved a dispute over service arising from Hamad Al Haroun's attempts to enforce a 2018 default judgement against Mr Al Sabah. Having obtained an interim third-party debt order against Kuwait Finance House, formerly Ahli United Bank (UK), Mr Al Haroun secured a cascade of further orders after the bank failed to respond, culminating in a contempt fine. He then brought fresh proceedings alleging that the bank had conspired with Mr Al Sabah, whom he said was protected by the Kuwaiti ruling family, to frustrate enforcement, and entered judgement in default.

The bank's case was blunt: it had received nothing beyond the original interim order and the court's later email chasing the fine, and Mr Al Haroun had obtained his orders by fraud, concocting certificates of service and manufacturing delivery evidence. The court identified three possible explanations. The documents were served but never escalated internally; they were served and deliberately ignored; or they were never served and Mr Al Haroun was lying.

The judge ruled out deliberate concealment by the bank, accepting the senior managers as truthful and finding it inherently unlikely they would have exposed the bank to a contempt sanction and a large judgement only to apply at once to set both aside. Choosing between the remaining explanations, he found internal failure the more probable. The bank's central argument, that documents marked as urgent court papers could not have vanished without trace, was undercut by proof that several signed-for deliveries had in fact reached the building yet were equally untraceable, and by the bank's own loss of its post room book. Crucially, no plausible motive was identified for so elaborate and risky a scheme, given that any contempt sanction would inevitably surface when the court sought to enforce it.

Those conclusions did not spare Mr Al Haroun. The judge found, on the balance of probabilities, that he had manipulated an Addison Lee delivery confirmation, substituting the delivery photograph and transposing a clerk's signature onto the front page of a hearing bundle, and had filed a false record of service in the 2023 proceedings by reusing a photograph of the same clerk under an altered date. Other forgery allegations, spanning certificates of posting shared with the fabricated-award case of Contax, metadata on backdated notices of change, and a doctored maintenance notice, failed for want of forensic evidence, and the judge attached limited weight to Mr Al Haroun's contested overseas convictions. Manipulation of the evidence, he stressed, did not equate to proof of non-service; the more likely inference was an improper attempt to "improve" the record.

Having found valid service, the judge still granted relief. The default judgement was set aside under CPR 13.3, the bank plainly having a real prospect of defending the conspiracy claim. The contempt order was set aside under CPR 23.11, the judge treating the circumstances as exceptional given the quasi-criminal character of contempt and the principle that an alleged contemnor must have a fair opportunity to answer the charge. Any re-hearing may await the outcome of the conspiracy proceedings.