Motorola stung for £838k after Chinese digital mobile radio biz Hytera wins appeal against UK asset-freezing order

Motorola must pay a Chinese mobile network radio maker more than £800,000 after losing a Court of Appeal case over claims its rival threatened to "retreat to China" and evade a previous judgment. The complex case was summarised in a Court of Appeal ruling where senior judges reversed a High Court asset-freezing order against …

[DavCrav]

So what I got from that is that there is general agreement in the court that Hytera will, in fact, do a runner and not pay the bill, it's just that they haven't stated it sufficiently clearly to have their assets frozen before said runner?

[I ain't Spartacus]

I think that’s just a statement of reality. Which is what the judge said, when he said it would be unfortunate if companies couldn’t discuss the reality of this in negotiations.

For example, say I make $50m a year profit from operations in the USA. Then, whether guilty or not, if a US company gets an inflated judgement against me of ten years profits, my response is obvious. Especially if the US arm is a subsidiary company, I’ll just bankrupt it and trade elsewhere. Why waste an entire decade making zero profit?

So I’d imagine the negotiations were about the two companies coming to a reasonable settlement, or Motorola getting nothing. Although a lot of these huge jury decided penalties get reduced on appeal anyway.

Or, if the trade secrets really are close to that valuable, to get the company to hand them back or agree to pay a mutually acceptable global license fee.

[Down not across]

UK != US jurisdiction (almost perhaps, but not quite)

Worried that the Chinese company would evade the US verdict by moving its assets outside US jurisdiction, Motorola filed in London for a freezing injunction against Hytera and two of its UK subsidiaries, Project Shortway Ltd and Sepura Ltd in April last year.

Whilst UK has a habit of cuddling up to the US, I still think its bit of a stretch to file in UK to enforce verdict in US.

[DavCrav]

Re: UK != US jurisdiction (almost perhaps, but not quite)

"Whilst UK has a habit of cuddling up to the US, I still think its bit of a stretch to file in UK to enforce verdict in US."

Very common to enforce civil judgments in other territories, I'm afraid. It's to stop people legging it to another jurisdiction. As long as the original ruling looks reasonable, it's normally enforced.

[llaryllama]

Re: UK != US jurisdiction (almost perhaps, but not quite)

If you borrow $10,000 on a credit card in Spain then leg it to Australia your creditor is perfectly entitled to chase you in Australia for repayment. This has nothing to do with long arms of the US.

[conel]

Deductible?

I wonder if they can have the costs taken off the original $763m in damages.