England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM CHANCERY DIVISION
(HIS HONOUR JUDGE LANGAN, sitting as a Deputy Judge of the High Court)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand London WC2 Wednesday, 12th June 2002

Wednesday, 12th June 2002

1. LORD JUSTICE ROBERT WALKER: This is an application for permission to appeal by Mrs Kosovka Mijakovac ("the applicant") who has appeared in person. She wishes to appeal from an order of His Honour Judge Langan QC, made when he was sitting as a judge of the Chancery Division of the High Court on 18th October 2001, dismissing the applicant's appeal from an order of District Judge Lord made in Leeds County Court on 4th September 2001.
2. The matter has a long and in some ways obscure history. In December 1994 the applicant proposed an individual voluntary arrangement under Part VIII of the Insolvency Act 1986 and it was approved by her creditors. A licenced insolvency practitioner, Mr Philip Lee of Philip Lee & Co of Leeds, was appointed as supervisor. At that time the applicant was a considerable property owner. She has told me this morning that the value of the properties ran into millions of pounds. Certainly, it must have been close to £1m. A schedule from the supervisor's files lists 20 houses in Leeds, mostly tenanted, although the applicant has annotated the schedule to indicate that five of the houses were in the sole name of her husband. It appears that she also had substantial liabilities, some of which were secured.
3. On 12th February 1994 the applicant gave Mr Lee a limited power of attorney to manage and dispose of the scheduled properties. On 5th September 1995 Mr Lee presented a bankruptcy petition against the applicant in the Leeds County Court. It was presented under section 264(1)(c) and section 276 of the Insolvency Act 1986 on the ground that the applicant had failed to comply with her obligations under the individual voluntary arrangement and had failed to comply with the supervisor's reasonable requirements.
4. On 19th January 1996 a bankruptcy order was made on that petition. The applicant appealed (no copy of her notice of appeal setting out her grounds is extant) but the appeal was dismissed by His Honour Judge Maddocks on 18th November 1996. The order shows that each side was represented by counsel, although the applicant says that that is incorrect. Judge Langan said that it was a matter which it was neither possible nor necessary for him to decide when he heard the appeal. The applicant made an attempt to bring a further appeal against the order of Judge Maddocks but no further appeal was ever heard, for reasons which are not clear.
5. On 27th July 2001, that is some five-and-a-half years after the bankruptcy order, the applicant made an application for annulment of the bankruptcy order. The judge said of this:

"The burden of her case is that the Order should never have been made in the first place because her assets at the time were quite sufficient to pay her debts. She plainly had a troubled relationship with Mr Lee and she would like to ventilate, if she could in this Court, a great many complaints about Mr Lee's conduct in the mid-1990s."

6. Annulment of a bankruptcy order is provided for in section 282 of the Insolvency Act 1986 which is in the following terms:

"The court may annul a bankruptcy order if it at any time appears to the court (a) that, on any grounds existing at the time the order was made, the order ought not to have been made, or (b) that to the extent required by the rules, the bankruptcy debts and the expenses of the bankruptcy have all, since the making of the order, been either paid or secured for to the satisfaction of the court."

7. The application was heard on 4th September 2001 by District Judge Lord. The official receiver's representative had no objection to an annulment order under section 282(1)(b) since the applicant's debts had been paid in full together with substantial expenses and remuneration, but he could not agree to, and the district judge would not make, an order under section 282(1)(a) - that is an order on the basis that the bankruptcy order ought never to have been made.
8. That issue had been heard and determined on appeal by judge Maddocks. On the appeal from District Judge Lord Judge Langan was not, more than five years on, prepared to re-open the matter. The applicant made an affidavit on 27th July 2001 which was before Judge Langan. Apart from a complaint about the spelling of her name (to which I can attach no weight) she made serious but not at all specific allegations against Mr Lee and against her own solicitor, Mr Cordingly. She has enlarged on those complaints in a recent statement dated 1st April 2002 prepared in support of this appeal. In that statement she has made a number of serious allegations against Mr Lee, including lying on oath, mismanagement of her former property and even physical violence towards the applicant at a meeting which took place on 28th March 1996.
9. The applicant has described herself as a victim of injustice. If there is any substance in her complaints it would appear that she has been the victim of a licenced insolvency practitioner who has seriously failed in his professional duty. However, I must at once make clear that I have heard only one side of the story. The evidence put before me was not before either judge below and there is no satisfactory explanation of why these matters were not put in evidence before.
10. Furthermore, the proposed appeal would be a second appeal, for which a particularly stringent test is laid down by section 55 of the Access to Justice Act 1999. A second appeal to the Court of Appeal would be a wholly inappropriate forum for the fresh investigation of complaints against a licenced insolvency practitioner. It appears that the applicant has already persuaded the Insolvency Service to set in train an inquiry. The applicant was not able to tell me anything about the progress of that inquiry except that it is being conducted by an independent body. That appears from a very recent letter which the applicant sent last week to Mr Jackson of the Insolvency Service, in which she wrote:

"I await the outcome of the investigation mentioned in your last letter in which you said that you have employed an independent body to investigate the handling of my affairs in full by your department."

11. I very much hope that that investigation may give the applicant some satisfaction, at least in feeling that her complaints have been the subject of independent investigation and scrutiny. However, for the reasons that I have mentioned I must dismiss her application for permission to appeal.
(Application dismissed; no order for costs).