Madison Legal have successfully defended the Third Defendant (“Mrs Dewsall”) in a high-profile case in London’s High Court of Justice. The case centres on, inter alia, allegations that former Directors of Gable Insurance AG (“GIAG”) orchestrated the dishonest misappropriation of approximately £12 million from the company between 2010 and 2018. Madison Legal are instructed by the wife of GIAG’s former CEO, William Dewsall. Mr Dewsall was also the sole director and shareholder of an underwriting agency called Hogarth Underwriting Agency Limited (“Hogarth”). Hogarth were not a party to the claim, but were engaged to provide underwriting, claims handling, marketing and other administrative support services to GIAG.
The trial concluded in July of this year, before Deputy High Court Judge Robin Vos (“DHCJ Vos”), with judgment being handed down on 5 September 2025 (“the Judgment”). Whilst certain of GIAG’s claims against the First and Second Defendants succeeded, the claim against Mrs Dewsall failed entirely. The Judgment sets an interesting precedent in respect of backwards tracing, trusts, subrogation, and improvements. The Judgment can be found at Gable v Insurance (2025) EWHC 2280 (Ch) and we summarise some of DHCJ Vos’s key findings below.
Claims Against Mrs Dewsall
GIAG did not issue any personal claims against Mrs Dewsall. Rather, GIAG argued that some of the misappropriated money was used for improvements (“the Improvements”) to Weald Hall, a family home beneficially owned by Mrs. Dewsall (“the Property”), and for partial repayment of a mortgage on the Property (“the Mortgage”). The Property has since been sold, with the net proceeds of approximately £850,000 held by the Court, pending a consequentials hearing which is likely to be listed in November 2025.
Tracing
The Property / the Mortgage
GIAG claimed a proprietary interest in the Property, including a charge over it, as a result of tracing funds misappropriated from GIAG. The proprietary interests claimed by GIAG were said to arise firstly due to its entitlement to be subrogated to a charge over the Property, as a result of £600,000 of funds held by Hogarth that were used to part repay a secured loan of £1.7m made by Investec. This raised the question of whether repayment of a secured debt entitles a claimant to be subrogated to the previous creditor’s security.
In terms of the Mortgage, Daniel Feetham KC (Counsel for Mrs Dewsall at trial) submitted that the repayment of a loan taken out to purchase a property (even if secured over the property) does not give a claimant a proprietary interest in the property unless backwards tracing is possible which, in this case, it was not, since the necessary ‘close causal and transactional link’ between the taking out of the Mortgage and the repayment was lacking. Essentially, it was not possible to backwards trace because the Mortgage had been taken out some 16 months before repayment of the Mortgage was made so it could not be said that the loan payment was sufficiently linked to the original purchase transaction. There was no clear causal and transactional connection between the use of GIAG’s money and the acquisition of Weald Hall: the funds simply went to discharge a debt and could not be traced further. DHCJ Vos also noted that GIAG had not in fact pleaded a backwards tracing case, so the argument failed both procedurally and substantively.
As far as subrogation is concerned, Mrs Dewsall’s position was that, for subrogation to be available to vindicate a proprietary right, that proprietary interest must first be established. As backwards tracing was not possible (see above), there could be no subrogation (and therefore no charge). In the absence of a proprietary interest, Mrs Dewsall submitted that, based on the more recent authorities, subrogation based on repayment of a loan secured over a property is only available as a remedy where a personal claim for unjust enrichment has been made. In this case, of course, no personal claims had been brought against Mrs Dewsall. DHCJ Vos distinguished between orthodox cases (where security was expected) and unjust enrichment cases like Parc (where it was not). GIAG’s claim did not fit either category. Whilst DHCJ Vos noted that there was a clear direction of travel treating subrogation as a remedy for unjust enrichment, he also made clear that subrogation in the context of a proprietary claim required some form of expectation of security, as in Butler v Rice and Ghana Commercial Bank v Chandiram, which was absent here. On the other hand, in Parc, the claim was couched in unjust enrichment precisely because there was no expectation of security. Accordingly, GIAG’s claim to subrogation failed as it was neither a case where the claimant could have been said to expect security, nor one pleaded on unjust enrichment grounds.
The Improvements
GIAG also claimed that other misappropriated funds held by Hogarth could be traced to payments made for the improvement or maintenance of Weald Hall which in turn entitled it to a proprietary interest in the Property.
In considering the extent to which tracing into repairs or improvements to a property allows a claimant to assert an equitable proprietary interest in the Property, DHCJ Vos noted that this was dependent upon the extent to which the funds can be said to represent an improvement in value in the Property. This approach therefore can be distinguished from that taken in Re Diplock [1948] Ch 465 which Lewin had considered binding authority for the proposition that tracing into improvements was not possible. DHCJ Vos’s judgment rejects that interpretation, clarifying instead that tracing into improvements is not barred outright but is strictly limited to demonstrable increases in value.
He acknowledged that the law on this point remains “at best, uncertain,” but referred to Millett J’s obiter in Boscawen v Bajwa [1996] 1 WLR 328, which supports the view that a proprietary remedy may be available to the extent that the land’s value has been increased by improvements. In other words, it is possible to trace a claimant’s money into property where the money has been used to pay for improvements to that property, but only to the extent of any increase in value.
However, GIAG failed on an evidential basis, it had not shown that the alleged payments into the Property actually caused a measurable increase in the Property’s value, and had included several items which were held to simply be untraceable into Weald Hall such as the wages of the maintenance staff.
Accordingly, GIAG’s proprietary claims to both the Mortgage repayment and the Improvements failed, and the £850,000 proceeds of sale of Weald Hall were declared to belong to Mrs Dewsall.
Successful Dismissal of Worldwide Freezing Order
Madison Legal were instructed in January 2025 and, owing to case management constraints, had to navigate a highly compressed trial timetable. Mrs Dewsall had previously been subjected to a £36 million Worldwide Freezing Order in November 2024. In March 2025, Madison Legal successfully persuaded Deputy High Court Judge Caroline Shea KC (“DHCJ Shea KC”) to discharge that order. The Court held that GIAG’s application had been unsustainable given its reliance on an “investigative report” which DHCJ Shea KC found to be without foundation.
Conclusion
The judgment provides important clarification of the limits of backwards tracing, confirms that subrogation in a proprietary context requires either an expectation of security or a properly pleaded unjust enrichment claim, and narrows the scope for tracing into property improvements to demonstrable increases in value. On the facts, GIAG failed on both legal and evidential grounds, and the Court held that Mrs Dewsall was entitled to the full £850,000 proceeds of sale of Weald Hall.
