Cross-Border Fraud Litigation: Trends in International Claims – Credit Suisse Bermuda v Ivanishvili

Summary: The Privy Council – very senior English judges whose common law decisions in practice bind or persuade England and most of the Commonwealth jurisdictions – has, in an appeal from a Bermuda CoA decision, abolished a recent doctrine which required fraud victims to consciously believe that the fraudster they were dealing with were honest. Since most honest people unconsciously assume everyone else is honest, this requirement of conscious belief was becoming a big problem for fraud victims.

Q: Why should anyone outside Bermuda care about this Privy Council decision?
A: Because it quietly rewrites an increasingly awkward corner of the common law of deceit – one that crops up in international fraud disputes involving all sorts of counter-parties including banks, insurers and complex investment structures. The Board has now confirmed that a claimant does not need to prove conscious awareness of an implied misrepresentation in order to recover. Given how often sophisticated misconduct hides behind implied assurances, this matters well beyond Bermuda.

Q: What was the problem the courts were wrestling with?
A: A line of English authority had suggested that, in order to rely on an implied representation, a claimant must show that they were consciously thinking about it when acting—an evidential hurdle that verged on the absurd in real-world commercial settings. The notion that a private client signing structured products must mentally articulate, “my relationship manager is not secretly siphoning assets,” was always unrealistic.

Q: So what did the Privy Council actually say?
A: It rejected that approach. The Board held that deceit requires only that:

• the defendant’s conduct caused the claimant to hold a false belief; and
• the claimant acted on it to their detriment.
• No requirement of conscious contemplation. Deception operates perfectly well through assumptions, habit and trust – indeed, that is where sophisticated fraud thrives.

Q: Can you give a practical illustration?
A: The Board used familiar social examples. When you hail a taxi, you implicitly represent that you intend and are able to pay the fare. The driver does not pause to analyse the jurisprudential content of your raised arm. He assumes it, acts on it, and if you run off, he has plainly been deceived. A system of law which pretended to have window into the claimant’s brain and which then gave a better remedy to the ultra-analytical and not the reasonable everyday person, would be absurd. The law now says the same applies in financial markets: if conduct is calculated to induce a belief, the victim need not have consciously articulated it.

Q: Does this blur the line between misrepresentation and mere silence?
A: No. The distinction remains between causing a false belief and merely failing to correct one. Active concealment, engineered presentation and structured half-truths are actionable; a passive failure to volunteer information generally is not.

Q: Why is this development relevant for international practitioners?
A: Many cross-border fraud claims involve implied assurances around asset management, compliance, valuation or internal controls. This decision makes those claims simpler to plead and harder to defend. Institutions cannot avoid liability by arguing that the victim did not consciously register the implied assurance. That is a significant shift in a world of curated client relationships and opaque products.

Credit Suisse Life (Bermuda) Ltd v Ivanishvili & Ors No 2 (Bermuda) [2025] UKPC 53 (24 November 2025) https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKPC/2025/53.html