THE RATIO: the same judgment explained twice, once for anyone, once for the profession.

In Brief

Kenneth Wikeley used a forged contract to win a judgment worth more than 120 million US dollars against Kea Investments Ltd in a Kentucky court, in a case Kea never had the chance to defend because it was never properly told about it. Once Kea found out, it went to the High Court of New Zealand, where Wikeley’s company was registered, and obtained orders stopping him from enforcing the judgment anywhere in the world. The Court of Appeal accepted that the judgment was fraudulent but lifted those orders anyway, on the view that respect for the Kentucky courts meant New Zealand should wait for an appeal there to finish first. The Supreme Court has now put the orders back in place, holding that proven fraud gives courts in different countries a shared interest in stopping it, rather than a reason for one to defer to the other.

Background

Kea Investments Ltd is a British Virgin Islands company connected to the New Zealand businessman Sir Owen Glenn. In 2012, Kea was persuaded to commit 129 million pounds to an investment scheme promoted by an associate of Eric Watson, another New Zealand businessman. An English court later found that Watson had induced that investment by fraud, and ordered him to pay Kea tens of millions of pounds. Watson was eventually jailed for contempt after failing to disclose his assets.

Kenneth Wikeley, a friend of Watson’s, then engineered a second fraud against Kea. He produced a document called the Coal Agreement, dated to look as though it was signed in 2012, under which Kea was said to have promised to fund coal investments through Wikeley’s family trust. The agreement was almost certainly created around 2021, shortly before it was used in litigation, and it named Kentucky as the place any dispute had to be heard.

In August 2021, Wikeley Family Trustee Ltd, the New Zealand company running his trust, sued Kea in Kentucky for more than 120 million US dollars under the Coal Agreement. Kea never found out about the case in time to defend it, because its agent in the British Virgin Islands failed to pass on the paperwork. In January 2022, the Kentucky court entered default judgment for the full amount.

Kea learned of the judgment five months later, when Wikeley’s lawyers demanded payment. It applied in Kentucky to have the judgment set aside, arguing the contract was forged and that it had never been properly served. That application failed. The Kentucky court found service on Kea’s agent had been valid.

Kea also turned to the High Court of New Zealand, since Wikeley’s trust and its trustee company were both registered there. In November 2022, the High Court granted urgent orders stopping Wikeley and his company from taking any further steps to enforce the Kentucky judgment or the Coal Agreement, anywhere in the world. Wikeley responded by trying to move the judgment out of the New Zealand court’s reach. He incorporated new companies in Kentucky, purported to assign the judgment and the Coal Agreement to them, and tried to change which country’s law governed his family trust. Each step broke the High Court’s orders.

To stop the pattern, the High Court placed Wikeley’s trustee company into interim liquidation. The independent liquidators who took over sided with Kea, since their duty was to undo the fraud rather than continue it. In November 2023, after finding as fact that the Coal Agreement was forged and the Kentucky judgment was a product of fraud, the High Court made its injunctions permanent.

Wikeley appealed. The Court of Appeal left the fraud findings untouched but lifted the injunctions anyway. Respect for the Kentucky courts, it held, meant New Zealand should wait for Kea’s own appeal there to be decided before intervening.

The Issue

The central legal question was about comity, the principle that courts in one country should respect the legitimate authority of courts in another. Anti-suit and anti-enforcement injunctions, of the kind granted here, sit uneasily with that principle. An anti-suit injunction stops someone from pursuing a case in a foreign court. An anti-enforcement injunction stops them from collecting on a judgment they have already won there. Both can look, from the outside, like one country’s courts telling another country’s courts what to do, even though the order is directed only at the person, not the foreign court itself.

Because of that tension, courts have traditionally been cautious. The usual approach asks whether the foreign proceedings are vexatious or oppressive, whether the domestic court has a strong enough connection to the dispute, and whether the interests of justice genuinely require an injunction. The Court of Appeal added a further condition of its own, that such relief should be a last resort, granted only once the person seeking it had exhausted its remedies in the foreign court, including any appeal.

Kea argued that proven fraud changes this calculation. Once a court has found, as a fact, that a foreign judgment rests on forgery, ordering a stop to its enforcement looks less like second-guessing an honest foreign decision and more like protecting the court’s own process from being used to profit from that fraud.

The Decision

The Supreme Court reinstated the injunctions, in a judgment given by Kós J. It held that fraud reframes the comity analysis in two ways.

First, a judgment obtained through forgery and false evidence is exactly the kind of vexatious and oppressive conduct these injunctions exist to restrain. Second, once fraud is established, courts in different countries share an interest in stopping it, rather than being pulled apart by deference to each other’s process.

The Court also rejected the idea that Kea had to exhaust its Kentucky appeal before New Zealand could act. Waiting for a foreign court to rule on whether it had itself been defrauded would only prolong the fraud. By the time of this appeal, Wikeley’s own trustee company was in liquidation, controlled by officers of the New Zealand court whose duty was to unwind the fraud, not carry it forward. Requiring them to wait on Kentucky, while a fraudulently obtained judgment sat on the company’s books, served no one’s interests but Wikeley’s.

The Court restored the High Court’s original orders in full. It ordered Wikeley and his associated companies to pay Kea 250,000 New Zealand dollars in costs, on an indemnity basis given the scale and persistence of the fraud, and a further 30,000 dollars to the liquidators.

Reasoning

The ruling rests on a distinction the Court of Appeal had dismissed as a pretence: that an anti-enforcement injunction restrains a person, not a court. The Supreme Court restored that distinction to its proper place. A New Zealand court ordering a New Zealand company to stop enforcing a judgment is exercising authority it has always had over that company. What happens to the judgment in Kentucky, as a practical matter, follows from that order, but the order itself is addressed to the company, not to the Kentucky court, and claims no power to bind it.

Once that principle is back in place, the comity question becomes narrower than the Court of Appeal treated it. Comity asks whether granting relief shows disrespect for a foreign court’s legitimate authority. When a court exercises authority over its own fraudster, in relation to a judgment obtained by defrauding both the plaintiff and the foreign court itself, it is acting in a way a foreign court would presumably welcome once the fraud came to light.

There is also a narrower, practical point about what happens once a fraudster’s company ends up in the hands of independent liquidators. Their statutory duties left them no real choice but to support undoing the fraud. Making them wait on a foreign appeal, while a fraudulently obtained judgment continued to sit on their company’s books, would have put those duties in direct conflict with the very comity the Court of Appeal thought it was protecting.

Why It Matters

For non-lawyers: this case is a reminder that fraud does not become untouchable just because it crosses a border. Courts can still act against someone within their reach, even when the fraud was carried out through a court in another country. What matters most is where the fraudster and their assets can actually be found, since that is where a court has real power to act.

For practitioners: this is now the leading New Zealand authority on how fraud affects the comity analysis for anti-suit and anti-enforcement relief, and it squarely rejects any general requirement to exhaust foreign appeal rights first. It also confirms the in personam character of these injunctions as a matter of real doctrine, answering a challenge to that idea that has been building in recent Court of Appeal and English authority. The liquidation point is worth flagging separately. Once a fraudulent judgment creditor is under the control of independent liquidators bound by ordinary fiduciary duties, that supervision itself becomes a factor supporting injunctive relief, since the liquidators cannot lawfully do anything except unwind the fraud.

Quick Reference

  • Citation: [2026] NZSC 97, on appeal from Wikeley v Kea Investments Ltd [2024] NZCA 609
  • Bench: Winkelmann CJ, Glazebrook, Williams, Kós and Miller JJ. Judgment given by Kós J
  • Heard: 5 to 6 November 2025, with further submissions in June and July 2026
  • Orders made: 10 November 2025. Reasons given: 31 July 2026
  • Parties: J B M Smith KC, M C Harris, J L W Wass and S T Coupe for Kea Investments (instructed by Gilbert Walker, Auckland); Kenneth Wikeley appeared in person; M D Arthur and J Marcetic for the interim liquidators of Wikeley Family Trustee Ltd (instructed by Chapman Tripp, Auckland); A E Kirk as counsel assisting the Court; no appearance for Eric Watson, Wikeley Incorporated or USA Asset Holdings Incorporated
  • Key paragraphs: [104] to [112] (what these injunctions are, and why they bind a person rather than a court) · [117] to [130] (how fraud reframes comity) · [134] to [135] (no requirement to exhaust foreign appeals first) · [141] to [143] (costs, and why indemnity costs were justified)