It is not sufficient for an office-holder merely to assert that they are entitled to documents under the Insolvency Act 1986 without providing evidence of a reasonable requirement for those documents.
This decision shows that while the Insolvency Act provides office-holders with broad powers to obtain documents and information for the purposes of investigating the company’s affairs, the court will not grant an application that is unreasonably broad and unsubstantiated by evidence as to why the documents are reasonably required.
The court was not persuaded that the application to court was necessary, as the Respondents had cooperated with focussed requests for documents. In fact, they had only resisted when the liquidators insisted that they should deliver up absolutely everything they held “in relation to” the company in liquidation. The court found that this was not the appropriate approach.