Shan v Registrar of Companies [2026] EWHC 1058 (Ch)

A useful refresher on how judges approach witness credibility and evidence when the documents run out in shareholder disputes, workplace investigations and beyond

In Shan v Registrar of Companies [2026] EWHC 1058 (Ch), HHJ Richard Carter (sitting as a High Court Judge) had to resolve a family share-ownership dispute reaching back four to ten years. Few contemporaneous documents survived. The witness best placed to explain matters, the late Ali Akbar Shan, had died in 2022. The case turned almost entirely on credibility.

The judgment very helpfully and eloquently works through a familiar but valuable framework:

– The Gestmin warnings. Memory is fallible, distorted by time, and shaped by the litigation process itself. Witnesses are rarely consistently reliable or unreliable across every issue.

– The Bilta fallback. Where documents cannot anchor the evidence, the court weighs overall plausibility, internal and external consistency of behaviour, supporting inferences from other documents, and the witness’s performance under cross-examination.

– The factors set out in Phipson on Evidence for assessing whether a witness is lying, including consistency with agreed facts, internal consistency, credit on collateral matters, demeanour, and the inherent probability of the account. I was surprised to see demeanour still on there given it’s been largely debunked.

– The Painter v Hutchinson indicators of unsatisfactory witness evidence, such as evasive answers, tangential speeches, blaming legal advisers, shifting cases, and selective disclosure.

Most striking, the judge gave himself a Lucas direction more usually applied in respect of criminal cases. Witnesses lie for different reasons. A witness may lie in a foolish attempt to bolster what is in fact a good case, or because the whole case is itself a lie. Establishing a lie does not automatically discredit the entirety of a witness’s evidence.

The claimant succeeded. The defendant’s account of a key 2005 meeting was undermined by travel documents showing the deceased was in Barcelona that day, and his shifting explanations under cross-examination did the rest.

A judgment worth keeping close when preparing witnesses, or cross-examining them.

Shan v Registrar of Companies [2026] EWHC 1058 (Ch)

Full Judgment: https://lnkd.in/exMjFDAW