A recent judgment of the Royal Court of Guernsey (“the Court”) (Neneb Pte. Ltd v HSBC Management (Guernsey) Limited and HSBC (Guernsey) GP PCC Limited) provides useful guidance to parties seeking the release of assets captured by Guernsey’s “no-consent” regime, and highlights the important role that robust forensic accounting evidence can play in establishing provenance.
Andrea Harris, Recovery, Reorganisation & Forensics Partner and Head of Advisory of Grant Thornton Advisors Limited (“Grant Thornton”), played a pivotal role in assisting the Court in determining the provenance of funds through her expert forensic report (“the Report”), and provision of expert evidence to the Court during the trial in September 2026.
Andrea was assisted by Samuel Hilton, Recovery, Reorganisation & Forensics Senior Manager, Keir Donaldson, Recovery, Reorganisation & Forensics Senior and the wider Grant Thornton forensic team.
In the judgment, handed down on 21 October 2026 (“the Judgement”), the Jurats expressly found that Andrea is "an experienced professional who gave credible expert evidence to the Court."
The Court’s decision
The proceedings concerned distributions made by two investment structures, which had effectively been frozen following the filing of a Suspicious Activity Report by the relevant bank and the Guernsey Financial Intelligence Unit declining to consent to their release. At trial, the central issue before the Court was whether the claimant could establish the provenance of the funds used to initially make the investments.
The burden of proof rested with the claimant, which applied the civil standard i.e. the balance of probabilities. The Court ultimately concluded unanimously that the invested funds were not, and did not represent, the proceeds of crime, and ordered that the distributions due to the claimant be released by the bank. The Report materially assisted the Court in reaching this conclusion, with reference to the Report made throughout the Judgment.
Reconstructing the provenance of funds
The case highlights the challenges that can arise when the relevant source of wealth and transactions stretch back decades, span multiple jurisdictions, and where certain documentation is missing.
Grant Thornton was instructed to undertake an independent forensic review and prepare the Report to address the provenance of the investment funds. The analysis involved reconstructing the movement of funds through historic banking records and considering the evidence available to determine their original source.
Grant Thornton’s work identified the flow of funds through several jurisdictions during the relevant period (which included analysis of more than 30 years of banking records) and concluded that the funding for the investments likely originated from the identified account. The Report also recorded that no evidence had been identified to suggest that funds received into that account were derived from illicit activity.
Importantly, the exercise also illustrates a practical reality of provenance investigations: a complete documentary trail may not survive where transactions took place many years ago. A forensic expert therefore needs to distinguish carefully between what can be established from primary records, what can be corroborated by other contemporaneous evidence, and what evidential limitations remain. An expert also ultimately needs to be clear on where those limitations lie, and the resulting assumptions made.
What does the decision mean in practice?
The Judgment reinforces several practical points for parties involved in no-consent matters:
- Provenance is ultimately an evidential exercise. Assertions as to legitimate wealth are unlikely to be sufficient without relevant supporting evidence.
- Historic transactions can still be investigated. Gaps in documentation do not necessarily prevent a provenance case from being established, but the available evidence must be analysed systematically.
- Independent forensic evidence can be pivotal. Accountants can reconstruct historic fund flows, interrogate banking and corporate records and provide the Court with an independent opinion on what the financial evidence demonstrates.
- Limitations should be transparent. Where records are unavailable, limitations should be clearly explained, rather than seek to bridge evidential gaps through assumptions.
For individuals, fiduciaries, financial institutions and their legal advisers dealing with frozen assets, this decision is a useful reminder of the value of addressing provenance early and building a structured evidential record.
Grant Thornton’s forensic services
Grant Thornton’s Channel Islands forensic team assists clients and their legal advisers with complex financial investigations and disputes, including:
- Source of funds and source of wealth investigations;
- Asset tracing and reconstruction of historic transactions;
- No-consent matters;
- Valuation disputes;
- Matrimonial / Inheritance disputes;
- Loss quantification;
- Fraud solutions; and
- Analysis of banking, accounting and corporate records.
Grant Thornton’s specialists are experienced in providing independent expert accounting reports and expert witness evidence across a variety of the forensic matters listed above. Our Recovery, Reorganisation & Forensics team includes 7 Certified Fraud Examiners, while Ben Rhodes, Andrea Harris, Samuel Hilton in Guernsey, and James Pirie in Jersey, have completed the Cardiff University Bond Solon Expert Witness Certification and are Accredited Expert Witnesses.
