What happens if you purport to assign a debt for ready cash without recourse, but agree to reimburse the assignee in the event that the assignment turns out to have been invalid? One would have thought that the answer was clear. And indeed it is; but only after oil major BP, with a cool $68 million at stake, chose unsuccessfully to take the matter to the Commercial Court on a pettifogger’s technicality in National Bank of Abu Dhabi PJSC v BP Oil International Ltd [2016] EWHC 2892 (Comm).
BP sold a parcel of oil on credit to Samir, a Moroccan refiner, and then assigned 95% of the debt to the NBAD for cash. The assignment was explicitly without recourse, but BP warranted that there was no legal impediment to the debt being assigned and agreed that if there was it would reimburse NBAD $68 million-odd. Samir went into insolvency leaving NBAD unpaid. It then transpired that the supposedly assigned debt was indeed unassignable without consent (ironically as a result of a provision in BP’s own boilerplate). NBAD sued BP on its warranty claiming its $68 million. BP argued that nothing was owing because even if the clause made the debt unassignable, the purported assignment had given NBAD rights that were just as good as an assignment, namely an equitable right to any proceeds in BP’s hands.
Carr J had no difficulty in rejecting BP’s argument. The debt was clearly unassignable; BP was in breach of warranty; the clause meant what it said; the amount recoverable under it was not in issue; and the result was therefore clear. The fact that the breach of warranty might be regarded as technical was beside the point.
This seems logical. Essentially what BP were trying to do was to argue that even if they had been in breach of warranty NBAD had suffered no loss as a result of their breach. But while this might have been relevant if NBAD’s claim had been a garden variety claim in damages, it was clearly irrelevant if, as here, the contract itself laid down the measure of recovery. Quite rightly, her Ladyship declined to subvert this result by holding that an express warranty to provide a valid assignment can be satisfied by providing the next best thing, however good a substitute others might think it was.
Note: this particular issue will become moot as regards debts governed by English law as and when the Government overcomes its lethargy and gets around to implementing subordinate legislation under s.1 of the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 (useful details here) to outlaw blanket anti-assignment clauses of this kind.
