Altaf Hussain to move UK Court of Appeal against £10m properties case ruling

LONDON: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) founder Altaf Hussain is set to appear before the UK Court of Appeal to challenge the judgment handed down by Insolvency and Companies Court (ICC) Judge Clive Jones a year ago — depriving him of six London properties worth around £10 million.

The appeal, on narrow grounds, will start on Tuesday morning at the Court of Appeal and will last for two days, where Hussain is the claimant and MQM-Pakistan (MQM-P) leader Syed Aminul Haque is the respondent.

In a judgment handed down on March 13, 2023, ICC Judge Jones, sitting as a High Court Judge in the Business and Property Courts, held that nearly half a dozen London properties were owned by the MQM-P.

Altaf Hussain’s appeal relates to the interpretation of Constitutional documents of unincorporated association (MQM) in particular, whether the MQM which owned properties in the UK was the same entity as the party or as a separate entity. This is a dispute over the ownership of six properties and the proceeds of the sale of a seventh in North London.

In March last year, Hussain lost £10 million worth of London properties case to his former loyalists in the MQM-P after a legal battle at the UK High Court. Judge Jones had ruled: "The MQM-P is the real MQM and its members are the true beneficiaries of the trusts that control London's properties which are currently under the control of Altaf Hussain".

The judge said that MQM founder Altaf Hussain had resigned from the party after his August 2016 speech. He ruled that Syed Aminul Haque's lawyer had established that the MQM's April 2016 Constitution was adopted and "it has not been established that the 2015 Constitution was adopted and on the balance of probability it was not."

ICC Judge Jones in his judgment said: "As on 23 August 2016 Mr Altaf Hussain stood down from any role in or involvement with MQM-P. Whether temporarily or permanently that did not alter before his expulsion from MQM-P when he formed a new association operating from London."

The MQM-P and Haque were represented by Barrister Nazar Mohammad and Hussain and his colleagues by Richard Blake KC.

The case was launched at the UK High Court by Haque against the party's founder and other trustees/defendants (Iqbal Hussain, Tariq Mir, Muhammad Anwar, Iftikhar Hussain, Qasim Ali and Euro Property Developments Limited) for the control of the trust that controls the following six properties: 12 Abbey View house in Edgware, High View Gardens first house, High View Gardens second house, Whitchurch Lane first hous, Whitchurch Lane second house, 53 Brookfield Avenue house and the MQM 1st Floor Elizabeth House office (once known as International Secretariat).

Criticising the ruling, Hussain said that the judge failed to take into consideration basic facts of how his party was hijacked by Dr Farooq Sattar and other MQM leaders in Karachi who didn’t let him return to the MQM after his August 22, 2016 speech and then his voluntary relinquishing of powers to Sattar and the Central Coordination Committee (CCC).

After the “disappointing”, “unfair,” and “shocking” decision by the London judge, Hussain said that the British courts had a long-established history of fairness and justice “but this doesn’t mean that a sitting judge knowingly or unknowingly cannot commit a blunder”.

Hussain argued that the judge said that the MQM founder “formed a new association, performing from London after 22nd August 2016” which was laughable because he was the ideologue, founder and lifetime leader of the very party that he had founded as a firebrand student leader in Karachi nearly four decades ago.