Richard Healey

Expertise

Richard is the Head of our Business Services Platform, Head of our disputes practice as well as a member of our management board. Richard also leads our London office. 

He has extensive expertise of handling complex international disputes and has wide ranging experience in international dispute resolution. He has significant extra-territorial experience in asset tracing and recovery and of representing parties in disputes in the High Court and Arbitration Tribunals, as well as numerous overseas courts including the Courts of Appeal of Hong Kong, Singapore and Gibraltar. In addition to England & Wales, Richard is qualified to practice in: the Courts of Northern Ireland, the Republic as well as the Astana International Financial Centre of Kazakhstan.

Richard began his career as a banking and financial services litigator at the international law firm, Simmons & Simmons and now has more than 25 years of experience of handling complex cross-border disputes. 

Amongst those claims regularly handled by Richard are actions in contract, equity and tort including claims for unlawful means conspiracy, dishonest assistance and knowing receipt. This is in addition to more commonly encountered claims for professional negligence as well as claims pursued by insolvency practitioners pursuant to their powers under the relevant insolvency legislation.

Richard has extensive experience of obtaining injunctive relief including: worldwide freezing orders; search and seize orders; Norwich Pharmacal; passport orders; as well as delivery up orders. He also has particular expertise in recovering the proceeds of fraud on behalf of clients utilising complex and sophisticated techniques to maximise recoveries.

Richard has throughout his career acted for: governments (both in the UK and overseas), corporate clients, financial institutions, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

In the UK Richard has had conduct of a number of cases which have been successful in the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. During his career he has had more than 30 reported cases.

Richard has been instructed in numerous high value offshore matters most recently from the BVI and the Dutch Antilles, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf States. 

Richard has lectured extensively on asset tracing and recovering the proceeds of fraud for organisations such as:

• BPP
• R3 (the professional organisation for insolvency)
• HMRC
• The Insolvency Service
• Overseas lecturing assignments have included: 
  • the European Union Advisory Mission to Ukraine; 
  • overseas banks;
  • the Deposit Guarantee Scheme of Ukraine;
  • the Financial Monitoring Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan; and 
  • the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Uzbekistan. 

Richard has extensive experience and deep sector knowledge in advising clients on innovative funding solutions to enable the pursuit of claims which otherwise would not be brought, as well as the litigation funding market and strong relationships with a number of litigation funders who regularly instruct Richard to both pursue claims on their behalf and to advise on the viability of funding potential claims.

Experience

1. Had conduct of in excess of 1,000 cases during his career.
2. Successfully obtaining in excess of 300 orders for injunctive relief.
3. Successfully acting for claimants in the pursuance of a cross-border claim for unlawful means conspiracy in the courts of England, Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong; this required the obtaining of freezing orders (or their equivalent) in each of the jurisdictions and then effecting service of them simultaneously.
4. Acting for court appointed receiver in a successful recovery of a valuable piece of real estate from an offshore company seeking to recover the property pursuant to the exercise of its security rights.
5. Acting for a liquidator in resisting an appeal to the Supreme Court against a decision of the Court of Appeal in connection with the ability of a claimant to pursue a third party in tort in circumstances in which the corporate claimant has itself been implicated in fraudulent conduct.
6. Acting for an ultra-high-net-worth individual in successfully leading and coordinating a multi-jurisdictional recovery action in the High Court of England and in actions brought in both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
7. Being successfully engaged as the principal external legal advisor to the UK Tax Authorities’ Specialist Investigations Directorate between 2004 and 2013 and having conduct of over 1,000 cases for HMRC resulting in the making of substantial recoveries for the UK Government in the course of so doing, litigating in numerous jurisdictions and applying for multiple forms of injunctive relief and the dissipation of assets.