When Banks Must Say No: the Quincecare duty in Singularis v Daiwa and JPMorgan v Nigeria

On 30^th October 2019 the Supreme Court gave its judgment in Singularis Holdings v Daiwa Capital Markets [2019] UKSC 50, dismissing the appeal from the Court of Appeal where Daiwa had been ordered to pay damages for executing payment instructions given by a director of Singularis.  The result now provides the highest authority for the Quincecare duty of care, and the difficulty for banks in attempting a defence based on a customer’s own illegal acts.

 Singularis comes hot on the heels of the Court of Appeal’s decision in JPMorgan v Nigeria [2019] EWCA Civ 1641, which considered the scope of the Quincecare duty owed by a bank which has reasonable grounds for suspecting that its customer’s order is an attempt to misappropriate funds, and the difficulty of excluding such a duty.

Paul Downes QC, Stewart Chirnside and Simon Oakes will examine the extent of the Quincecare duty in the light of these recent decisions and the cases preceding them, and will also consider the interrelationship between the concepts of being “on enquiry” and a banker’s duties to freeze an account where it suspects money laundering under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.