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UPON the Judgment of Sir Richard Field dated 31 May 2015 ordering the Claimant and the Defendant to file submissions on the issue relating to the currency of the Claim;
AND UPON the Claimant filing their submissions on 14 June 2015;
AND UPON the Defendant making no submissions;
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED THAT:
The applicable conversion date in this case shall be the date the Claim Form was issued.
The Claimant shall serve a re-calculation of the sum sued for, including interest, taking the date of the Claim Form as the applicable conversion date.
REASONS
The time by which the Defendant was directed to serve submissions in reply to the Claimant’s submissions on the currency issue ordered to be addressed in the Judgment herein is now well past. I therefore now give my ruling on this issue.
The Claimant’s claim for sums due under the loan agreement was expressed in US dollars, notwithstanding that the currency of the loan was pounds sterling. This may have been because the prescribed pro forma Claim Form contemplates the claim being made in US dollars.
The conversion date adopted by the Claimant was the date the loan was advanced. In my view, this is the wrong date to take for conversion purposes, since down to at least the issuance of the Claim Form, the obligation arising under the loan agreement was an obligation denominated in sterling. In these circumstances, I think there are two potential conversion dates: the date of the issue of the Claim Form or the date of enforcement of a judgment given in sterling. The latter date would I think be the most appropriate, but RDC 36.14 only allows for conversion at the date of enforcement if judgment has been given in a currency other than US dollars, which was not something that was sought in this case and it is now too late to amend the claim.
In the result, I find that the applicable conversion date in this case should be the date the Claim Form was issued and I invite the Claimant to serve a re-calculation of the sum sued for, including interest, taking the date of the Claim Form as the applicable conversion date.
