No end in sight to London courtrooms" oligarch litigation boom ©Getty Ukraine oligarch Victor Pinchuk When the late Boris Berezovsky suffered a crushing defeat last year in his $6.5bn lawsuit against Roman Abramovich, some experts predicted oligarchs would start to think twice about settling their differences in London courtrooms. Yet, the intensification this week of a $2bn High Court legal battle between three of Ukraine's richest men suggests there is no end in sight to the litigation boom involving tycoons from the former Soviet Union. Victor Pinchuk, a former Ukrainian politician whose interests range from metals to media and who numbers Tony Blair among his contacts, is suing two other magnates, Gennadiy Bogolyubov and Igor Kolomoisky, for alleged breach of contract and trust. The two men have both filed robust defences this week in preparation for a trial that is expected to take place next year and will centre on shares in Ukraine's KZhRK, the state iron-ore company privatised in 2004, and allegedly lost dividends. Mr Pinchuk alleges the defendants held in trust a controlling stake in KZhRK through an offshore company, for which he paid $143m, and that they reneged on their agreement, which was mainly made orally. The two men say in their defences there was no such agreement. Other High Court cases under way include a dispute between Ukrainian businessmen Konstantin Kagalovsky and Alexander Altman and lawsuits involving the estate of Berezovsky, who died in March. In a recent speech, High Court judge Mrs Justice Carr noted that of 705 rulings by the Commercial Court, a subdivision of the High Court that handles business disputes, between March 2008 and March 2013, 61 per cent of litigants were from outside the UK. Many were people from Russia, eastern Europe and central Asia who amassed wealth following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Mrs Justice Carr noted that overseas litigants came to London because it was a "safe and neutral forum" overseen by an independent judiciary and, unlike the US, civil cases did not have juries. "Furthermore English law provides litigants with a significant arsenal of powerful interlocutory weapons including freezing injunctions and search orders," she added. If a contract is governed under English law . . . as a number of contracts are in Russia today, then disputes will come to London Bill Bowring, chairman of the British Russian Law Association London has therefore become the destination of choice to settle disputes, delivering a windfall for the capital's legal services industry. Also attractive to overseas litigants is the fact that English law recognises oral agreements between parties - Russian law does not. Mr Bogolyubov's dispute with Mr Pinchuk is not his first brush with UK courts this year. Last month, the High Court found in favour of his company Eclairs in a dispute with London-listed JKX Oil & Gas. JKX had attempted to impose voting restrictions at its AGM on Mr Bogolyubov as well as Alexander Zhukov, father of Mr Abramovich's girlfriend Dasha Zhukova, and Switzerland-based Igor Kolomoisky. Some cases are not business disputes but involve more personal matters such as reputation or even divorce. In 2010, Lord Justice Thorpe questioned the use of judicial time in cases where "the parties have slender connection with our jurisdiction" as he ruled on the case of Russian couple Ilya and Elena Golubovich. The High Court is also waiting for a judge to rule in the case of Bill Browder, the UK-based campaigner behind the US Magnitsky Act. Mr Browder has asked a judge to throw out a libel lawsuit brought against him by a Russian policeman he had accused of being involved in Russia's biggest tax fraud. Mr Browder, the one-time biggest foreign investor in Russia, is unpopular with Moscow after he lobbied the US Congress to pass an act that imposes visa bans on Russians linked to the 2009 death in jail of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Professor Bill Bowring, chairman of the British Russian Law Association, said that there had been a lull after the ruling in the Berezovsky case but more cases were now in the pipeline. "If a contract is governed under English law . . . as a number of contracts are in Russia today, then disputes will come to London," he said.