Four days later, on 22 December 2008, Shell applied in the Amsterdam District Court for permission to obtain a pre-judgment garnishment or conservatory attachment over all assets of Fairfield Sentry held by Citco Bank up to a value of US$80m.

However, Fairfield Sentry was entitled to apply inter partes to lift the attachment and did so; that application was rejected by the District Court of Amsterdam on 16 February 2011.

On 21 July 2009, Fairfield Sentry was ordered by the High Court of the British Virgin Islands to be wound up and Mr Kenneth Krys and Ms Joanna Lau were appointed as its joint liquidators.

On 8 March 2011, shortly after the District Court of Amsterdam rejected Fairfield Sentry's challenge to the attachments, the joint liquidators applied in the High Court of the British Virgin Islands for an anti-suit injunction restraining Shell from prosecuting its proceedings in the Netherlands and requiring it to take all necessary steps to procure the release of the attachments.

The order restrained Shell from taking any further steps in the existing Dutch proceedings against Fairfield Sentry or commencing new ones, but did not refer in terms to the attachments.

The Privy Council then recapped the fundamental principle applicable to all anti-suit injunctions, as stated at the outset of the history of this branch of law by Sir John Leach V-C in Bushby v Munday.

He was restrained by injunction from proceeding in India, but obtained the value of his debt from the liquidator in return for lifting the attachment, without prejudice to the question whether he should be allowed to retain it.

Sir William James LJ said: All the assets there would be liable to be torn to pieces by creditors there, notwithstanding the winding-up, and there would be an utter incapacity of the Courts there to proceed to effect an equitable distribution of them.

The English Act of Parliament has enacted that in the case of a winding-up the assets of the company so wound up are to be collected and applied in discharge of its liabilities.

It is property affected by the Act of Parliament with an obligation to be dealt with by the proper officer in a particular way… One creditor has, by means of an execution abroad, been able to obtain possession of part of those assets.

They were based not specifically upon protecting litigants against vexation or oppression, but on the protection of the court's jurisdiction administer fairly and equally between claimants to an insolvent estate: One such category of case arises where an estate is being administered in this country, or a petition in bankruptcy has been presented in this country, or winding up proceedings have been commenced here, and an injunction is granted to restrain a person from seeking, by foreign proceedings, to obtain the sole benefit of certain foreign assets.

Their Lordships noted that in the present case, the Judge at first instance having concluded that the issue of an injunction would be contrary to principle, the Court of Appeal were entitled to overrule him and to exercise their own discretion.

They exercised it in the liquidators' favour, and the Board should not interfere unless it is shown that they were guilty of some error of principle or misconception of fact, or that they were plainly wrong.

Commentary on the decision was generally positive, one commentator noting that "The judgment can be seen as a further endorsement of the restrained brand of the modified universalism developed in the Privy Council's recent decision in Singularis Holdings Ltd v PricewaterhouseCoopers", and "[i]t also clearly signals the BVI Court's willingness to intervene to protect the statutory scheme of distribution by means of anti-suit injunctions whilst providing useful guidance as to how the courts will exercise their equitable jurisdiction.