The Court dismissed both the plaintiffs' claim and the defendants' counterclaim, finding that neither party proved on the balance of probabilities that the USD $12,979,155.10 transferred from a Hong Kong BVI company account to Australia belonged to them. The Court held that the principle in Salomon v Salomon was fatal to the first plaintiff's claim: money held in a bank account in the name of a BVI company was the property of that company, not of its alleged sole shareholder, and the plaintiff failed to tender even a company search to prove his asserted ownership and control of the BVI entity. The Court also found that the defendants failed to prove their positive defence that RMB 66 million of the transferred funds belonged to the first defendant's father and his business partner, given the absence of any documentary trail linking alleged transfers to the Hong Kong account and the unreliability of the oral evidence and ledgers relied upon.
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