Greek owner Evangelos Marinakis is hauling senior current and former executives of DNB Bank before an Oslo court next week, in a lawsuit over his aborted attempt to list a subsidiary on Norwegian public markets nearly four years ago.
Marinakis' company Capital Maritime & Trading Corp (CMTC) is suing DNB for damages over the bank's refusal in April 2018 to provide so-called VPS services, which would have allowed CMTC unit CVL Corp to register its shares with the Norwegian securities depository.
As a result of the refusal, CVL, who is also a plaintiff, had to change course and set up as a private company instead, incurring additional financial costs in the process. CMTC is also seeking compensation for having had to put up $17m for working capital.
In litigation papers filed publicly in Oslo, CVL also claims it has suffered reputational damage and that it is crucial for future projects that courts establish that DNB acted unlawfully, negligently, or that it simply lacked objective grounds.
TradeWinds reported in 2018 that Marinakis was planning to list CVL on Oslo's Merkur market, after securing $40m to $50m from a small group of major investors in a potential eight-VLCC newbuilding project at Samsung Heavy Industries.
According to the plaintiffs, DNB initially signalled no concerns to provide the requested VPS services but changed tack after the publication of an article in UK newspaper The Guardian, which identified Marinakis in connection with legal proceedings in Greece over a football and a narcotics case.
A Greek court has since acquitted Marinakis and several other co-defendants of all football-related match-fixing allegations.
The drugs case concerns an intercepted illicit cargo for which Greek courts have already convicted about a dozen people back in 2016. However, a Piraeus judge revived the case two years later. As TradeWinds reported, Marinakis has always vehemently rejected any involvement.
Extraordinary circumstances
According to the plaintiffs, DNB arbitrarily refused the requested services without having carried out any proper investigation or assessment of the risk arising from them — which it said were very low anyway, given VPS services' procedural, administrative nature that should only be refused under extraordinary circumstances.
DNB officials declined to comment on an ongoing case.
In its court submission, DNB did not deny that its actions might have caused financial harm to the plaintiffs but said that it was obliged to deny the transaction and had objective reason to do so.
According to the litigation papers, the results of DNB's enhanced customer due diligence were found to be "unsatisfactory".
Without elaborating on the material reasons that prompted it to refuse the services, the bank said that information about possible punishable actions could not be refuted at the time.
It also said that on its residual risk assessment of the request, it could only apply a "yellow" mark to the fields concerning social responsibility and reputation instead of a "green" one.
DNB also said that CVL gave DNB a very short time to process the request for VPS services, while it waited for two years to file its lawsuit.
The trial hearing is set to take place between 23 and 26 November.
