Book Description

Because of the rise in cross-border disputes – and due to the ease with which assets can be moved around the world with the help of online banking and fiduciary service providers – parties are increasingly finding themselves suing or being sued outside their home jurisdictions. This book is about how to find out whether a defendant has any assets before initiating costly litigation, arbitration, or insolvency proceedings, and if so how to freeze such assets with the aim of eventually enforcing a judgment or award. Nineteen country chapters by lawyers with decades of hands-on experience in helping their clients find, freeze, and attach defendants’ assets provide practical guidance to legal professionals representing parties in cross-border commercial lawsuits, international arbitration proceedings, simple debt collection matters, enforcement proceedings, divorce proceedings, inheritance matters, and other legal matters where the assets in dispute are thought to be located abroad. Each contribution offers an overview of the pre-trial asset tracing techniques and rules regulating freezing orders and enforcement methods in the jurisdiction covered, describing not just what the law says but how the law actually works. The jurisdictions covered include several of the offshore havens that are frequently used to hide assets in. The authors attend to such issues and topics as the following: • investigating whether a potential counterparty owns vessels, aircrafts, motor vehicles, real estate, or intellectual property rights; • locating offshore trusts; • discovering assets transferred to a family member or corporate entity; • exposing sham investments designed to generate a (fictitious) loss of assets; and • invoking remedies available to a party facing asset shielding manoeuvres. This book will quickly become an indispensable tool for international litigators, arbitration lawyers, and lawyers involved in cross-border insolvency and debt recovery proceedings, as well as for academics and scholars involved in legal research projects or law reform programs. Renowned litigator Robert Shapiro says in his Foreword: 'The authors provide the reader with practical guidance into the complex area of cross-border asset tracing and do so in a very down-to-earth way, without the academic hyperbole that generally burdens modern legal textbooks.'