Held, claim dismissed. (1) The law was reluctant to impose a duty to prevent a party from suffering from pure economic loss and thus the courts had taken an incremental approach to extending the situations where an employer might be under a duty to protect employees from such losses. In a novel case, the question whether there was a duty of care to take reasonable care for the safety of the employee, and the financial interests which went with that, would be very fact-sensitive and would depend on a consideration of the precise facts in each case. The duty alleged in the present case was a novel one and was a narrow, fact-intensive duty based on various factors including the specific nature of the work that the claimant did, the country in which he was required to work, the foreseeability of the harm that could befall him, including in the form of specific amber and red flags that, allegedly had already come to the bank’s attention, and the gravity of the consequences if the risks materialised. The claimant having failed to prove that being exposed to a conviction in the performance of his duties for the bank had been reasonably foreseeable, the duty of care therefore failed by reference to the facts of the case. It followed that the bank did not owe the claimant the particular duty of care pleaded (paras 106, 119, 120, 150, 154, 225, 227).

(2) On its established scope the general indemnity implied into employment and agency relationships was limited to payments or liabilities, namely, payments made and payments to be made in discharge of liabilities incurred in the course of or in consequence of the employment or agency. There was no authority in which losses other than sums paid or payable to third parties had been found to be recoverable and there were convincing reasons for refusing to hold that an implied indemnity could extend to consequential losses such as loss of earnings. In particular, such an indemnity would sidestep the incremental approach that had been taken to the extension of a prima facie duty of care in tort, at a stroke providing legal remedies where none had previously existed, regardless of the novelty of the category of case, and imposing a huge burden on employers. Moreover, an indemnity in such terms would cut across many statutes about employer’s liability and would not be consistent with the legislative policy in employer’s liability statutes. It was not for the court to circumvent the statutory framework in that way. Accordingly, the scope of the indemnity ought to be limited to payments and expenses incurred or liabilities requiring a future payment. While an employee/agent had an indemnity for losses resulting from legal wrongs committed by third parties, originating from the employee’s performance of their duty, it did not open up an indemnity in respect of consequential losses going beyond costs, expenses and liabilities (paras 302, 304, 326, 330, 332–338, 341–344, 348).

(3) The indemnity formulated by reference to “unlawful enterprise” was no broader in scope than the general indemnity, as it simply delineated the circumstances in which the broad indemnity was not lost for participation in an unlawful enterprise and it was not therefore a separate implied term or a different form of indemnity. The claim to such an indemnity therefore failed in the present case for the same reasons as the claim by reference to the general indemnity. As to whether a broader indemnity could be implied on the facts of the particular case, in order to give effect to the presumed intention of the parties, the factors relied upon for establishing such an indemnity were very closely connected to the way in which the claim in negligence had been put and the basis for such a finding was not made out on the facts. Accordingly, the claim for the indemnity, whether implied in law or in fact, failed (paras 347, 348, 358, 359, 364, 365, 369, 370).