MOSCOW, September 25 (RAPSI) - English courts are playing host to an increasing number of international claims, including many from Russia and the CIS countries, London-based litigation partner Jeremy Cole of Hogan Lovells explained during a fraud panel hosted by RAPSI Wednesday.

Cole explained that there has been a “huge increase” in international litigation in recent years in the London courts. In his words, “over the last four years in our commercial court, litigants who are from overseas – outside the UK – have increased by 30%. Over 60% of our litigants in our commercial court are from outside the UK. 8% of those are from the CIS region.”

He added that the cases from the CIS tend to generate the largest values in dispute, often in the billions, citing the late Boris Berezovsky’s case against Roman Abramovich (amount in dispute: $5.5 billion), and BTA Bank’s case against now-jailed Kazakh oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov (amount in dispute: $6 billion) among other examples.

Chris Hardman, another of the firm’s London partners, explained that there are many cases from this part of the world playing out in the courts of various offshore zones as well, noting that he had been told anecdotally that about half of the disputes going through the British Virgin Islands courts are of Russian or CIS origin.