Magomedov v TPG: Court of Appeal refuses to reopen permission to appeal refusal in Russian ports conspiracy claims

The Court of Appeal has dismissed an application to reopen a refusal of permission to appeal arising from jurisdiction and strike-out proceedings in a complex multi-party conspiracy dispute involving Russian port assets worth billions. The judgement of Moylan LJ and Miles LJ confirms the narrow scope of CPR 52.30 and the high threshold required to demonstrate that the integrity of appellate proceedings has been critically undermined.

The underlying proceedings concerned claims by Ziyavudin Magomedov, a Russian national imprisoned in Russia since 2018, and associated entities, against 22 defendants. The claims alleged two separate but related conspiracies — the NCSP Conspiracy, relating to interests in Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port, and the FESCO Conspiracy, concerning a stake in FESCO, the parent of a major transportation and logistics group owning the Commercial Port of Vladivostok. Both were advanced primarily as unlawful means conspiracies.

Bright J had determined jurisdiction and summary judgement applications following 13 hearing days across September and November 2024, delivering a judgement exceeding 120 pages in January 2025. He found no serious issue to be tried against the principal FESCO defendants including TPG, DP World and GHP, no applicable jurisdictional gateway against those defendants where a serious issue did exist, and a serious failure of fair presentation in relation to the NCSP claims sufficient to justify setting aside permission to serve out.

Males LJ refused permission to appeal on all 23 grounds in June 2025. The claimants subsequently applied under CPR 52.30 to reopen that refusal.

The FESCO grounds

The claimants argued that Males LJ had failed to grapple with their "disaggregation" argument — that Bright J had impermissibly analysed individual transactions in isolation rather than assessing the conspiracy evidence in the round. The Court of Appeal rejected this. Males LJ had read the 87-page permission skeleton and addressed grounds 1 to 6 together, a course he was entitled to take given their common thread: that the judge had erred in his assessment of the merits. The disaggregation point was simply one element of that broader challenge. No failure to grapple with it was established, and there was no powerful probability that a separate treatment of the point would have produced a different result.

A discrete argument that Males LJ had overlooked the inducement of breach of contract claim against TPG alongside the conspiracy claim was similarly dismissed. Given Bright J's conclusions on TPG's involvement and state of mind, the court was firmly of the view that permission would have been refused on that claim regardless.

On the jurisdictional gateways, the court found that Males LJ had properly addressed both the English law contract gateway and the necessary and proper party gateway, and had reached conclusions that were rationally available on an evaluative assessment of the connections between the two alleged conspiracies.

The NCSP and fair presentation grounds

The court examined three distinct fair presentation failures identified by Bright J. The most substantial argument concerned whether a subsequent abuse of process contention by D20 — Transneft — could have neutralised the claimants' own failure to disclose completion events at the ex parte stage in September 2023. The court rejected this analysis. The duty of fair presentation is owed to the court and is assessed as at the date of the ex parte application. A defendant's later forensic decisions cannot retrospectively relieve an applicant of breaches already committed.

The court also rejected the submission that Males LJ had wrongly treated fair presentation as a purely discretionary matter, finding this characterisation unfair: his reference to "discretion" was shorthand for the well-established principles governing appellate interference with evaluative first-instance decisions.

Throughout, the court emphasised the distinction drawn in Municipio de Mariana v BHP Group Plc [2021] EWCA Civ 1156 between demonstrating that an appellate judge's decision was wrong — which is insufficient — and demonstrating that the integrity of the appellate process was critically undermined. The application fell squarely into the former category.

The application was dismissed.