The Defence Brief

  Background - CPS served a witness statement on me that exhibited two BWV clips that are potentially relevant to the Crown’s case and may have some relevance to the defence case insofar as they are likely to show the lighting and weather at the time events happened. Somebody has listed the clips as unused material rather than putting them in the exhibits folder that accompanies the served evidence. This raised an interesting (to me anyway) question about whether a party who exhibits an item in a statement is bound to serve it on their opponent. At court the judge took the view that the Crown were at liberty to classify items exhibited in s9s as unused material if they chose not to rely upon them in evidence. I took the view that if they are exhibited then they must be served along with the witness statement that exhibits the item and that the solution to a situation where the Crown say they are now unused is to edit the witness statement to remove the reference, by agreement with ...

Vladmir Putin and Alisher Usmanov Since Russia invaded Ukraine, we have all suddenly become far more aware of the government’s power to impose sanctions on individuals and businesses that they believe are connected to the Russian government and its murderous dictator, Vladimir Putin. These sanctions have led to sob stories with angles that would have seemed impossible just a month ago, e.g.  ‘Will I be allowed a cleaner, or a driver?’ Life after sanctions for a Russian oligarch . Mr Aven, the gentleman worried about whether someone else can clean his house or drive him about, was telling Vladimir Vladimirovich way back in 2000 that he should be ruling as a totalitarian dictator and “ applying the Pinochet stick ”.   Much of the commentary has been extremely gung-ho for sanctions and completely devoid of any reasoned consideration of how sanctions  do  work and how they  should  work.   The power to impose sanctions is contained within the Sanctions and...