The Court made a personal costs order on an indemnity basis against the plaintiffs' solicitor under s 99(2)(c) of the Civil Procedure Act 2005 (NSW), holding that his refusal to provide a non-party affected by a freezing order with even basic information about the order — purportedly justified by the Harman undertaking — was without reasonable cause and put the non-party to unnecessary legal expense. The Court found the Harman undertaking rationale was nonsensical as applied to providing a copy of a freezing order to a person directly affected by it, and that the solicitor's stonewalling was unjustifiable where his clients had no claim to the non-party's share of the frozen proceeds and ultimately did not resist dissolution of the order.
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