The High Court of Justice, King's Bench Division, Administrative Court handed down judgment in Director of Public Prosecutions v Zhimin Qian and another [2026] EWHC 2509 (KB) on 12 October 2026, claim number KB-2024-0003157. Mr Justice Turner heard argument on 7, 8 and 9 July 2026, with further written submissions on 20 July 2026. The hearing determined one preliminary question, identified by an order of 5 June 2026 as the Applicable Law Issue. No evidence of Chinese law has yet been put before the court.
The applicants proceed under section 281 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which sits in Part 5 of that Act and lets a person claiming to be the victim of theft or other unlawful conduct assert an interest in property that would otherwise be recovered. The judgment also treats sections 240, 243 and 282A, and section 1 of the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025. Turner J held that questions about the consequences of the contracts and transactions entered into in China fall within Article 12 of Rome I, with the consequences of avoidance inside Article 12(1)(e), and that on that route the applicable law is Chinese law. English law as the law of the situs decides whether Bitcoin is property, a point not in dispute, and governs the proprietary questions arising once the Director asserted a claim to recoverable property in England.
Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology Co Ltd, acting by joint litigation receivers David Standish and Michael Leeds, and the individual applicants who say they paid money into the scheme must now prove their proprietary case by reference to Chinese law rather than English trust principles. The practical weight moves onto expert evidence of Chinese law, which the court has said it will not speculate about. For the Director of Public Prosecutions the English law questions are narrower: whether the Bitcoin is recoverable property here, and how competing interests rank once a Part 5 claim is on foot.
Turner J rejected the argument that a proprietary characterisation keeps the dispute outside Rome I, holding at paragraph 27 that property is not a conceptual trump card for the lex situs, and rejected the argument that the matter is administrative. The court went on to consider Rome II in the alternative, in case the Rome I analysis is wrong. Kazakhstan Kagazy v Zhunus was treated as no sure guide on the first claim and more relevant to the fourth. The content of Chinese law, and its effect on whether the underlying contracts are void or voidable, has still to be decided.
Licentium advises exchanges, custodians, receivers and claimant groups on cross border recovery of digital assets and on how choice of law shapes a proprietary claim. Work we undertake includes mapping competing claims to seized cryptoassets, instructing and testing foreign law evidence, advising on section 281 applications and civil recovery exposure, and drafting custody and transfer terms so that the governing law of a transaction is settled before a dispute arises.