Former shipowner Nobu Su has been sent back to prison for 24 months after admitting to 20 new counts of contempt of court.
High Court Judge Sir Michael Burton committed Su to custody in London's Pentonville prison during a hearing on Tuesday and sentenced him on Wednesday.
"I am satisfied that his conduct merits longer than the maximum sentence of 24 months," Burton said.
"And [Su] is fortunate the law only permits a 24-month sentence."
The former Today Makes Tomorrow (TMT) boss has admitted all of the new counts of contempt brought against him by the claimant, Lakatamia Shipping, which is controlled by Cypriot shipowner Polys Haji-Ioannou.
July 2008
Polys Haji-Ioannou agrees to buy Nobu Su’s position in the forward freight market via his company Lakatamia Shipping. Su agrees to repurchase the position after one month.
October 2008-October 2009
Su repays some but not all of his outstanding liability against Lakatamia, refusing to pay the balance of $37.9m.
March 2011
Lakatamia issues a claim for breach of contract in London against Su and the TMT Group.
August 2011
A court-ordered freezing injunction is effected on Su’s assets worldwide.
November 2014
A judge finds in favour of Haji-Ioannou and Lakatamia, awarding them $37.9m.
January 2015
A further judgment orders Su to pay an additional $9.9m in interest.
November 2015
Two villas owned by Su are sold in Monaco.
February 2016
Su is ordered to pay the claimants’ legal costs of £1.1m, bringing the total judgment debt to $57m.
February 2017
The net proceeds from the villas’ sale is transferred to lawyers of Cresta Overseas, of which Su was beneficial owner via his company Portview Holdings.
March 2017
Sale proceeds transferred from Cresta to the Taipei bank account of Up Shipping.
February 2019
Freezing order effected against Su's mother, Toshiko Morimoto, Cresta and Portview.
March 2019
Su is jailed for 21 months for contempt of court.
September 2019
London's Court of Appeal refuses to grant Su permission to challenge his prison sentence. Su offers to purge one count of contempt with partial repayment of the court award.
February 2020
On 11 February, Su is found guilty of two further counts of contempt and receives an extra four months in prison. He had been due for release on 12 February.
April 2020
Su released from prison on 9 April.
July 2020
Su files for bankruptcy in London.
July 2021
Su's bankruptcy is annulled by a London court. A week later, a judge sends him back to prison.
Photo: John Allan/Creative Commons
The claimants seek to enforce payment of a court award made in their favour against Su in 2014, which now totals nearly $60m including interest.
Su has not yet repaid any of the award and has failed to comply with court orders concerning disclosure of his assets.
This is the third time Su has been committed to prison in this case.
He was jailed for 21 months in March 2019 for multiple counts of contempt of court after a judge found Su had breached the global freezing injunction on his assets.
A day before Su was due to be released, Sir Michael Burton issued him with a further four-month custodial sentence in February last year, following an application from Lakatamia.
Prisoners usually serve only half of their sentence under English law, which meant Su was freed from Pentonville prison in April last year. He has been living in north London since then.
The London court last Thursday annulled Su's bankruptcy, which he obtained in July last year, for debts of £654m ($901.9m).
This will allow the Taiwanese national to be pursued once again by his creditors — principally Haji-Ioannou.
New counts
The counts of contempt against Su include dissipating and concealing assets, failure to disclose documents, and failure to grant access to his social media and email accounts.
All of these actions are in breach of court orders.
Su allegedly failed to disclose his ownership of a company called Ocean Net, from which big payments were made, circumventing the freeze on his assets, according to a court submission by Lakatamia.
In February last year, Su told the Court that only his mother, Toshiko Morimoto, could settle the judgment debt owed to Lakatamia and that he would ask her to do so.
But the same day, Su instructed Ocean Net employees to pay $53,375 to a Hollywood producer to fund two pop music videos in which one of his daughters was to star, according to the claimants.
The claimants have also alleged that the day before he was sent to prison in 2019, Su instructed Ocean Net to pay around $422,000 to payees including his two daughters and an associate who ghost writes his books.
Su initially denied he was the owner of Ocean Net, which he claimed belonged to someone named Tonic Lin, but later admitted that the company was his.
The claimants added that Su has fallen "woefully short" of complying with the many court orders willing him to disclose his assets.
"His previous protestations that he had learned his lesson were utterly meaningless," the document states.
Search of premises
The north-London flat where Su has been staying with a friend was subject to a court-ordered search in June last year.
Su barred solicitors from entering the property for two hours in breach of the order, according to court submissions.
The search yielded a cache of documents that assisted Lakatamia in uncovering the new counts of contempt.
As well as revealing Su's ownership of Ocean Net, the documents also showed that Su had an interest in two bulkers: the 17,000-dwt Clean Ocean 1 (built 1991) and 50,619-dwt Triumph (built 2004).
It had been thought that Su no longer owned any ships, but Lakatamia claims he was in negotiations in early 2019 to sell the Clean Ocean 1 for $1.9m. The claimants allege that the sale was never disclosed to them.
Lakatamia said its investigations show the Triumph has been at Ensenada in Mexico since August 2017 and that the ship is under the control of the Mexican Navy.
Polys Haji-Ioannou has also been pursuing Nobu Su's mother, Toshiko Morimoto, for allegedly helping her son circumvent the worldwide freezing order on his assets.
Her assets had been frozen by the London court. However, this order was discharged in August 2019.
But the claimants allege she sold her interest in a property in Japan she co-owned with her son before the freezing order was reinstated by the Court of Appeal.
The claimants believe Morimoto has passed the proceeds of the property sale to one of her daughters.
A trial against Morimoto lasting three weeks was held in March, for which a judgment is awaited.
