Court castigates BCCI liquidators' claim against Bank of England

The purpose of this paper is to describe how BCCI liquidators' claim against the Bank of England has been castigated.

The paper outlines the facts surrounding this decision and the action involved.

The UK's longest running and most expensive civil litigation has been labelled a farce by both the trial judge and the head of the judiciary.

The paper highlights how these proceedings raise fundamental questions about the rule of law and the appropriateness of the use of legal technique to achieve redress for such large‐scale and high profile losses out of the failure of financial firms and how they also contain cautionary lessons for the way in which regulators employ and use what are notions of “risk” and “risk based financial regulation”.