Five years of litigation later, the bill has now ballooned to US$250 million. Vietjet says it cannot pay, citing Vietnamese foreign exchange controls. Meanwhile, a London judge has just cleared the way, in principle, for receivers to go after the airline’s assets outside Vietnam.

Listed on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange, Vietjet is one of Vietnam’s 25 largest listed companies, with a market value approaching US$4 billion. It has been a conspicuous growth story in recent years, with ambitions reaching far beyond its home market.

It carries millions of passengers between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, one of the world’s busiest air corridors. But its expanding network stretches to Seoul and Tokyo to Sydney and Melbourne. That international reach is also giving a determined creditor somewhere to look for assets.

Caught in the middle are Vietjet shareholders who may not yet appreciate quite how costly and messy the dispute could yet become.

The legal tussle began in 2021 when Vietjet fell into arrears on four Airbus A321s it had financed through Japanese leasing structures. That September, the agent for the original consortium of lenders, Natixis, proposed deferring some US$8 million in overdue payments on outstanding loans until the following June. Vietjet wrote to accept the terms in early October, apparently believing it had found a way out. But the proposal was subject to lender approval, and no binding agreement had been reached.

Meanwhile, a different sort of investor was moving into the picture. FitzWalter Capital, a London-based investment firm founded during the pandemic by former Macquarie executives, had been set up to pursue opportunities in distressed debt and other complex investments. With airlines struggling during Covid and lenders looking to reduce their exposure, there was no shortage of potential business.

Natixis had already warned Vietjet that distressed-debt buyers and hedge funds were circling to buy the outstanding aircraft loans. On 8 October, just a day after Vietjet accepted the proposed deferral, FitzWalter began buying up the loans. Within weeks, the leases had been terminated and Vietjet was facing demands for the return of the aircraft and substantial termination payments.

By 2024, the irony was becoming hard to miss. An English judge found that Vietjet could have afforded to pay the original arrears, but had chosen not to. A decision to withhold US$8 million had set in motion a dispute that would span multiple jurisdictions and ultimately cost it more than US$250 million.

The airline has returned the planes and paid some of the earlier rental and legal costs, but has paid only around US$2 million towards the much larger judgment debt.

Winning in court, however, has proved rather easier for FitzWalter than collecting the money. Its attempts to enforce the judgments have taken it from Singapore to Ireland, Australia, France and beyond, with Vietjet fighting back at almost every turn.

Vietjet insists it is not refusing to pay. Rather, it says Vietnam’s foreign exchange controls prevent it from transferring the money abroad, an obstacle that an English judge previously acknowledged appeared genuine. The obvious solution would have been for FitzWalter to obtain recognition of its judgments in Vietnam. But the Hanoi courts refused, leaving the airline in a peculiar bind: liable for more than US$250 million in England, apparently unable to remit the money from Vietnam, and increasingly exposed to enforcement against its assets elsewhere.

The latest ruling in London threatens to take the dispute into altogether more uncomfortable territory. On September 30, a London judge had agreed in principle that receivership over Vietjet’s overseas assets was justified, but wants more evidence of the likely costs before making a final order. At the time he noted: “If Vietjet wishes to preserve its business from disruption, it should pay the debt.’’

If receivers are appointed over Vietjet’s overseas assets, the consequences could extend well beyond the courtroom, potentially disrupting the airline’s aircraft purchases, leasing arrangements and international expansion plans.

For Vietjet’s shareholders, the next chapter could come as something of a shock. The airline has disclosed the dispute in its accounts, but the US$250 million-plus judgment debt does not appear to have been separately provided for.

What shareholders may have regarded as a protracted legal headache could soon become a much more tangible problem for the airline.

The funds sought a general discovery order, hoping to get a look at Sohu.com’s internal documents. On October 1 they were rebuffed. The Cayman court was not prepared to let them rummage through years of company records on the strength of what it considered a thinly supported case.

Maso Capital, Blackwell Partners and Star V Partners in July filed a petition to wind up the Chinese internet giant led by founder and chief executive Charles Zhang not because it is insolvent (it has a substantial media and online gaming business), but because it is stubbornly sitting on a pile of cash.

The shareholders claim that the board’s failure to give proper consideration to paying dividends amounts to mismanagement and oppressive conduct, serious enough for a court to order its liquidation on “just and equitable” grounds.

Mr Justice David Doyle noted “there is not much meat on the bones’’ of the 16-page petition brought by the shareholders, who hold 3.37% of Sohu.com. The company, which has yet to file a defence, accused the funds of fishing for documents to flesh out their case.

Doyle refused the request for general discovery, but Sohu.com is not entirely off the hook. It must still produce documents central to the board’s decisions on dividends, and the funds can come back for more targeted disclosure.

The judge also warned the company against cherry-picking documents that support its case. The company must, according to the court, now produce evidence of the “machinations and determinations” of its directors over dividends.

Whether there is much of a paper trail is another matter. Did the board genuinely consider paying shareholders, or simply go along with founder Charles Zhang’s preference to keep the money in the company?

It is a familiar question at founder-dominated Chinese companies, where the distinction between a board decision and the wishes of the man in charge can sometimes be difficult to discern.

Sohu has not, at least so far, sought to strike out the winding-up petition altogether. That may be a tactical choice. Arguing that the shareholders have no case is one thing, but demonstrating that the board properly considered whether to pay dividends is another. The latter risks opening up precisely the questions about its internal decision-making that the funds are keen to explore.

For now, Sohu has won the opening exchange. But the board is still in play.

News reports at the time gave us a few pieces of the puzzle. Then came a judicial review from US activist investor Elliott. A report by Britain’s market regulator last March dropped some chunky breadcrumbs. Other traders meanwhile tried, but failed to get hold of what was said in some of the crucial meetings.

Now Elliott is back. After losing a fight at London’s civil and appeals courts over the LME’s decision to cancel the trades, the hedge fund has opened a different legal door. It says the LME abused its dominant position in the run-up to the crisis by failing to keep the nickel market orderly as prices spiralled.

It is a conceptual leap, but one the Competition Appeal Tribunal found “novel” but plausible enough to allow Elliott to serve its claim on HKEX. It is the first time LME’s Hong Kong parent has become a defendant.

Crucially, Elliott alleges that HKEX exercised “decisive influence” over the LME, putting the relationship between the exchange and its Hong Kong parent squarely in issue.

It is a development HKEX is unlikely to relish, particularly given the spikier part of Elliott’s competition case: that the LME and HKEX failed to properly identify or manage conflicts between their own interests and those of the market. The result, Elliott says, was to favour the shorts over the longs.

That question has always had an added sensitivity because the biggest beneficiaries of the cancelled trades were Chinese. Tsingshan Holding Group, the Chinese metals giant controlled by Xiang Guangda, had amassed a huge short position in nickel. As prices rocketed, Tsingshan faced enormous margin calls. The squeeze was also causing trouble for CCBI Global Markets, a unit of state-owned China Construction Bank and one of Tsingshan’s brokers, which missed hundreds of millions of dollars of margin payments.

The LME gave CCBI more time to pay, before suspending the market on March 8 and cancelling some US$12 billion worth of trades. That rescued Tsingshan from having to settle those trades, while wiping out profits for traders on the other side, including Elliott. The LME did not reopen the nickel market until Tsingshan had reached a standstill agreement with its banks.

None of that establishes that Chinese interests influenced the LME’s decisions. But it makes what was happening inside HKEX, and what passed between Hong Kong and London, more interesting.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) report into the nickel crisis, published after Elliott’s failed judicial review, gives the investor some ammunition here. The picture it paints is of an operation that was, at times, remarkably shambolic: senior managers struggling to work out what was happening, information not being shared properly and no clear picture of the risks building in the market.

Yet the LME was also talking to its members and relying on what they were telling it to understand those risks. Some were explicitly lobbying for the remedy the LME ultimately adopted.

One reading is that the LME was sensibly gathering intelligence from the market. Another is that interested parties had a ready route into the people deciding what to do next.

But there are some conspicuous blanks in the report. The members and LME senior management are not named and HKEX barely features. There is no mention, for example, of LME Clear chief Adrian Farnham turning to HKEX boss Nicolas Aguzin for help with China Construction Bank after its CCBI unit failed to meet a margin call.

Bloomberg reported that on March 7, Adrian Farnham, CEO of LME Clear, sent a WhatsApp message to HKEX CEO Nicolas Aguzin asking him to try to speak to China Construction Bank, because, in Farnham’s words, they couldn’t really allow CCBI “to not pay again.”

One WhatsApp exchange invites the question of what else is sitting in the files. If the competition case gets as far as disclosure, there may be emails, messages and internal exchanges that have never seen the light of day.

Whether any of this gets Elliott US$456 million it seeks in lost profits from the nickel crisis is another matter. But if the case prises out a few more pieces of what happened between London and Hong Kong in those crucial hours, it will already have done something useful. Four years on, there are still some rather good gaps to fill.

Copyright of Jane Moir, 2026