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Authorized Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska asked the London High Court to clarify the intelligence reporting agency of Sir Linton Crosby’s CT group to disclose information regarding the source of the suspicious forged documents.
Application submitted on Tuesday, name as respondent: CT Solutions & Private Advisory, unit founder Eugene Curley, and former global intelligence head of the company Leah James.
The case highlights that despite sanctions were imposed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Moscow in 2022, London courts remain at least partially open to Russia’s wealthiest businessmen.
Deripaska, former head of Russia’s aluminum group Rusal, was approved by the UK in March 2022. Under the state sanctions system, law firms can apply for a license from the Office for Implementing Financial Sanctions (OFSI) to act on behalf of an authorized individual or pay the opposition party if a prohibited client is in charge of the application.
The application relates to a forging assessment report, allegedly being used as evidence of a case in London between Deripaska and former Russian Deputy Finance Minister Vladimir Cernukin.
Last year, the judge said evidence pointed out that the document was a counterfeit “designed to cause extremely large losses to the Deripaska party.” The judge ordered U.S. litigation company Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, who acted for Chernukhin, to reveal CT Solutions & Private Advisory as the business intelligence company that provided the documents.
The judge’s October ruling said both Quinn Emmanuel and the business intelligence company “have serious concerns about the safety of the ultimate source” of the report.
Quillon Law, who acts on behalf of Deripasca in his disclosure application for CT Solutions & Private Advisory, said it was “operated under a license granted by OFSI, which is necessary to pursue this claim.” He declined to comment further. Quillon previously acted in a lawsuit with Quinn Emanuel for Deripaska.
OFSI is a unit of the UK Treasury and declined to comment.
The CT Group was co-founded by a former conservative election adviser, but it was previously said that Sir Linton Crosby had provided documents written in two other unrelated legal battles. In these cases, no fraudulent behavior was detected against the CT group. The plaintiffs in one of the cases sought to clarify the source of each of the court’s documents.
Carly, who has spent three years in foreign services in the UK, and James, who joined the CT group at G3, formerly of Carly’s business intelligence company, have left the CT group in recent months. Now retired, Carly declined to comment. James could not be immediately contacted for comment.
CT Solutions & Private Advisory said it “relied in good faith on sources and whistleblowers,” and its officials “we believed that it would be legal, appropriate, clearly and clearly directed and expected, and that the sources and whistleblowers would do the same.”
The company added that CT took internal measures in 2024 in relation to the law firm’s “employment of the litigation support it provides.”
