Stockwoods lawyers Paul Le Vay, Brendan van Niejenhuis and Benjamin Kates succeeded in resisting a motion to add the Toronto-Dominion Bank and several affiliates to an Ontario class action seeking damages for the widely-publicized foreign exchange scandal that came to light in 2013. In his decision released today, Justice Perell acknowledged that such motions are rarely rejected and that the plaintiff’s obligation to show that it exercised diligence in discovering a proposed defendant’s involvement is not a high burden. Nevertheless, in refusing to permit TD Bank to be added, he found that the plaintiffs had failed to show that they had exercised sufficient diligence to justify suspending the limitation period or to justify reserving the question of when they ought to have known to include TD for trial.
