Patrick Goodall QC and Ian Bergson successfully acted for the respondent bank in Elite Property Holdings Limited v Barclays Bank plc in which the Court of Appeal (Lindblom and Flaux LJJ) held that the bank did not owe a contractual duty to the appellant companies in relation to the Review it conducted into interest rate hedging products pursuant to the agreement with the Financial Conduct Authority. This is the first occasion on which this issue has been considered by the Court of Appeal.
The bank was also successful on a separate ground of appeal concerning the causation of loss. The Court of Appeal emphasised the necessity of pleading a causative link between the alleged missale of the financial product concerned and the consequential loss allegedly suffered. It was not open to the appellants to avoid this fundamental requirement by lumping all the IRHPs together on the basis losses allegedly continued.
A copy of the judgment is available here.