A Cayman Candle On The Mareva Injunction 50th Birthday Cake

Two recent judgments in the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands show how freezing injunctions are still nimble going into their 50^th year and continue to be a powerful and vital tool to preserve assets in the ever evolving commercial landscape of modern offshore litigation.

Introduction

Earlier this year, the legal world marked the 50^th 'birthday' of the Mareva injunction – in modern parlance the freezing injunction – which was born of judicial creativity in 1975 to stop defendants from moving their assets abroad to frustrate enforcement of a potential judgment.¹

Described by Lord Denning as "the greatest piece of judicial law reform in my time"² and historically by Donaldson LJ as one of the law's "nuclear weapons"³, the freezing injunction has stood the test of time, becoming "normalised" over these past 50 years "to an extent which would have surprised the lawyers attendant at their birth" and its scope expanded significantly.⁴ The modern freezing