The fine art of serving court papers
Serving court documents is a critical part of any civil legal claim, but some oligarchs and criminals will go to great lengths to avoid having the papers served on them. How do the experts track down their targets? Lou Stoppard reports
The afternoon of 4 October 2014 was too fine to be stood for hours sweating in a navy wool suit, but Paul Austin likes to look smart when he delivers the blow. Serving someone legal papers likely means “you are ruining that person’s day, quite badly”, he tells me. A certain formality, looking more like a business associate than “a heavy”, can help make the medicine – a bitter thing to swallow for the oligarchs and wayward globetrotters Austin deals with – go down easier.
The target that day was Leonid Mikhelson, a Russian-Israeli gas magnate once reported to be Russia’s richest man and, as of last month, one of the oligarchs sanctioned by the UK. Austin had chased Mikhelson for months, but had never come close. He hadn’t even come within miles of close. Mikhelson, who has a thick slab of grey hair and enjoyably expressive eyebrows, landed in London the night before on a chartered flight from Moscow. He likes to fritter his billions on art and, in 2009, started the V-A-C Foundation – named after his daughter, Victoria – which has given large sums to some of the UK’s top art institutions, including the Tate.
Now, Mikhelson was en route to another beneficiary, the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, for the opening of an exhibition. He was accompanied by Victoria – groomed, blonde – just in from New York, where she was studying art history. That morning, Austin and half a dozen colleagues had convened to discuss their plan and its potential pitfalls. What if Mikhelson arrived with security? What if he didn’t show? After months of work, this felt like their one chance. The endeavour had been expensive for their client, a businessman living in Israel who alleged Mikhelson had breached a 2007 real-estate agreement.
Come mid-afternoon, Austin was waiting near the gallery’s entrance, envelope in hand. Another colleague, Darren Harber, stood nearby with a duplicate envelope. Their goal was simple: hand Mikhelson the papers; tell him, clearly and firmly, he had been served; walk away. Nearby, a group of curators and fundraisers smoothed their finery and fixed their smiles, unaware of the other welcome party lying in wait. Mikhelson arrived in a chauffeured car at 6.20pm. Austin approached him and extended his hand with the document. Mikhelson, smiling at the suited man standing in front of him, reached for it and, for a moment, Austin felt a flood of relief. Briefly, both men held the envelope simultaneously. Austin began his spiel – “I’m here to serve you papers as part of a High Court claim” – but then Mikhelson started pulling away, his face ashen. The transaction was faltering; the envelope remained with Austin.
“Speak only Russian,” Mikhelson barked in English, before hurrying inside. Austin and his colleague followed him into the lobby. Again the papers were proffered and dodged. Harber tried to stuff his envelope between Mikhelson’s body and his arm, where it balanced for a split second before dropping to the ground. It was “pandemonium”, says Austin. He knew Mikhelson’s daughter spoke fluent English, but his pleas that she tell her father to accept the service went ignored. When the papers were placed on her handbag, she let them fall away. “Everyone was doing that very English thing of just standing there thinking, God this is really awful but I’m not going to do anything or say anything,” Austin says. “The gallery staff were just horrified at us.”
Finally, Mikhelson marched into the gallery, where he could be swaddled in the safety and deference patronage affords. As he walked away, Austin made one last-ditch attempt, hurling the document over the gaggle towards the Russian’s back. But the door swung closed too quickly and the envelope landed on the floor, where it remained for a while, guests scanning it with distaste. Austin picked it up and left. What a mess, he thought. Austin called his client to tell him the job was done. As hard as Mikhelson had tried to dodge it, he had clearly been served. The case could proceed. Then, three weeks later, a notice came through: Mikhelson was mounting a challenge. He didn’t take the envelope, didn’t know what was in it, and didn’t even speak English, he claimed. He had absolutely not, he said, been served.
“Right now in London, says Paul Austin, someone will be being served. There is always someone to serve”
In February, I met Austin, who is 42, at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall. He suggested the venue, which he tells me is rumoured to be the spot where the Soviet agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had one of their last lunches before fleeing the UK. “Right now, in London, someone will be being served,” Austin says. “There is always someone to serve.” Austin worked in intelligence for the Government, visiting Afghanistan twice, and later set up his own company, before training as a lawyer. He is intensely likeable, and yet, facially, instantly forgettable. Back at my desk after our first meeting, I tried to jot a few things down about his appearance and simply couldn’t. Glasses? Sandy hair? A... nose? The only thing I recalled clearly was that he had worn cufflinks in the shape of tortoises. This may be a blessing, given his profession. His mannerisms are more memorable. He is so amusingly English – polite, fumbling, partial to boarding schoolstyle slang – that at points it feels as if he is in character as the archetypal MI6 bureaucrat in a Bond movie.
Serving is “an art”, Austin tells me. It’s the point at which the minutiae of law, the endless paperwork, is rewarded with the
spectacle of a “gotcha” moment. It is, he says, “the way that justice begins”. Serving is required in civil proceedings, such as divorce or business disputes. In the popular imagination, serving tends to be a high-stakes yet vaguely comedic affair: recall, in 2013, papers being passed up to the American singer Ciara, as she performed on stage. Such theatrical episodes eclipse how mundane much of the profession can be, however. Many law firms, Austin tells me, pass it on to junior staff; a lawyer friend of mine refers to the process as “a piece of piss”.
This attitude may work out fine if the target is someone who is traceable online, Austin says, but with criminals or “professional obfuscators”, expertise is required. He knows this too well. Back in 2005, when he was a twentysomething newcomer to the game, he was dispatched to Costa Rica. He hadn’t been briefed – “nothing”, he says. He landed, drove “literally ten hours, went over a mountain, through the jungle”. There’s a photo of him on the beach in a full suit, which illustrates how ill-equipped he was for the trip. When he finally served the papers, the target looked baffled. Austin returned to London, triumphant, only to find he’d served the wrong person. “Just some random bloke in the jungle, wrong address, wrong everything. Pathetic,” he says. “I got absolutely bollocked.”
Still, Austin liked the chase. Now a veteran, his servings are usually the result of months, sometimes years of intelligencegathering. The process begins with what’s in the public realm – company records, social media posts. Typically, he finds nothing. So, he turns to “human intelligence”: a former nanny who might talk, maîtred’s, chauffeurs. There is also, Austin tells me, a pool of expert tipsters he can rely on. “Your Russia guys. Your Africa guys. Your art world people. Your mining guys.” Austin has had colleagues tell him being a woman with a child, or at least a pram, is helpful, as few suspect you to be a threat. And middleaged female associates have told him they feel perfectly suited to surveillance as, to many people, they are “invisible”. Austin confirms this is not a good industry for the striking: strikingly beautiful, strikingly short or tall. You need to blend in, and you need to notice everything. Because your target will slip up eventually. Invariably it’s “vanity” that lets them down, he says – an event they won’t miss, an invitation they can’t resist.
The next time I meet Austin it’s spring, and we’re back at the Whitechapel Gallery. Plenty has changed since our first meeting; Putin invaded Ukraine, Russian yachts are being seized, UK companies, lawyers and accountants are scrambling to cut ties. “Everyone is chasing oligarchs again,” Austin says. He points to the doors through which Mikhelson disappeared eight years earlier. “It was just here,” he says. For a long time, the Russian had smartly made a point of avoiding the UK. This made trying to serve him again near impossible. The breakthrough came thanks to an announcement from the Whitechapel Gallery that V-A-C would be funding a series of projects. Austin figured Mikhelson would be at the opening. “You’d want the fawning. To turn up, Mr Moneybags, and be lauded.” His instinct was correct, and the shock on the oligarch’s face when he was finally served was “amazing”, Austin says. “He knew he’d been busted.”
The attitude that one can wriggle out of anything bothers Austin. It’s part of the reason he does his job. A certain type of person thinks they’re above it, he explains. “They act like they occupy a parallel morality,” he says. “I guess it’s like Prince Andrew. Appalling really that he was trying to evade justice, to hide behind – quite literally – a castle wall.”
The Prince Andrew service was performed by Cesar Sepulveda of GCW-Intelligence. Sepulveda, who is 36, trained as a criminologist and is also, he tells me, a facial “super recogniser”. He has the build of a bodyguard and the face of someone you’d think carefully about disagreeing with. When we meet, he is wearing a pale pink V-neck jumper under a suit, with a Burberry scarf and a large watch. I immediately picture him in any number of situations: hosting ropey flat viewings as an estate agent, reclining in the VIP lounge at the Monaco Grand Prix. He says he’s been to gyms and exercised next to targets, and even served on Christmas Eve, at a client’s request, taking the papers to a family dinner. (“Everyone involved was there; very awkward.”)
Sepulveda first tried to serve Prince Andrew in August 2021, by driving to the gates of the Royal Lodge in Windsor. No luck. Police advised that officers “had been told not to accept service of any court process”. Sepulveda went back the next morning. This time, he asked to meet with the prince directly. He was rebuffed but stood his ground, saying he’d wait it out. Eventually, worn down, one of the guards allowed him to leave the summons, promising “this matter would then be forwarded to the legal team”. That was enough.
Like Austin, Sepulveda says targets always slip up eventually. “Maybe they win a chess competition, and it’s in the public domain.” I thought of a case Austin had told me about, an asset trace during which he finally managed to connect a dodgy magnate to a property because his daughter posted a poolside picture on Facebook: the target’s name was tiled along the bottom of the pool.
In 2015, the judge in the Mikhelson case dismissed the oligarch’s claim that he had no idea what the papers were about. His determined avoidance, the judge argued, actually revealed his understanding of what they were. The ruling ended up in legal textbooks, something of which Austin is proud. And yet, towards the middle of our first meeting, Austin grew, for a moment, somewhat melancholic. For all his aspirations of facilitating justice, sometimes “it’s just moving money from oligarch to oligarch”. He sees morality in a vaguely nihilistic way: once you cross to the dark side, you never go back. An oligarch steals money in a business transaction and avoids repercussions. “You’ll keep going back to that behaviour, partly because you can.”
The more I dug into Austin’s world, the more I understood his point of view. I thought a lot about a story he told me during our first phone call about trying to serve someone in the South of France. He’d chased the man and his female companion from casino to club, club to casino, before he realised the target was being chased by someone else as well, a gang connected to his new girlfriend. As with many of the stories Austin told me, I struggled to work out who I was supposed to root for; who were the good guys and, if there were good guys, how did they differ from the bad? The only guarantee seemed to be the tap on the shoulder. Because, if your case crosses Austin’s desk or Sepulveda’s, that tap will come. “If you’re a good investigator, you’ll always find them, you always will,” Austin told me. And I believed him.
A longer version of this article appeared in the Financial Times © The Financial Times Ltd 2022
“When serving legal papers it helps to be a woman with a child, or at least with a pram, as few suspect you to be a threat”