Parent company duties of care. Hearing date set for Okpabi appeal to Supreme Court.

I have been informed by Leigh Day, acting on behalf of the appellants, that their appeal will be heard by the UK Supreme Court on 23 June 2020

These observations of Lord Briggs in Lungowe v Vedanta [61] may prove to be significant in the forthcoming appeal.

“[I]t seems to me that the parent may incur the relevant responsibility [for the
tort of a subsidiary] to third parties if, in published materials, it holds itself out as exercising that degree of supervision and control of its subsidiaries, even if it does not in
fact do so.   In such circumstances its very omission may constitute the
abdication of a responsibility which it has publicly undertaken.”

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Professor Simon Baughen

Professor Simon Baughen was appointed as Professor of Shipping Law in September 2013 (previously Reader at the University of Bristol Law School). Simon Baughen studied law at Oxford and practised in maritime law for several years before joining academia. His research interests lie mainly in the field of shipping law, but also include the law of trusts and the environmental law implications of the activities of multinational corporations in the developing world. Simon's book on Shipping Law, has run to seven editions (soon to be eight) and is already well-known to academics and students alike as by far the most learned and approachable work on the subject. Furthermore, he is now the author of the very well-established practitioner's work Summerskill on Laytime. He has an extensive list of publications to his name, including International Trade and the Protection of the Environment, and Human Rights and Corporate Wrongs - Closing the Governance Gap. He has also written and taught extensively on commercial law, trusts and environmental law. Simon is a member of the Institute of International Shipping and Trade Law, a University Research Centre within the School of Law, and he currently teaches at Swansea on the LLM in:Carriage of Goods by Sea, Land and Air; Charterparties Law and Practice; International Corporate Governance.

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