Our Litigation Team in the recent case before the District Court of Limassol with No. 1225/2019 represented a group of companies and successfully obtained a Judgement by which an interim order that was granted on an ex parte basis was cancelled.

In the case under examination, a group of companies (defendant) objected to the interim order granted to the applicant, an ex-employee of the defendant. The applicant through his ex parte application requested the court to give him back full access and control to the social media accounts and email of the company that he used to work for. The court granted the interim injection to the applicant who claimed between others that these accounts contained sensitive information for his clients as well as other personal information that were crucial for his job and clientele. He further claimed that after he stopped working for the defendant he lost communication with his clients as a result of the defendant’s action to block his access to his work email and the company’s other social media accounts that he personally run.

The defendant challenged the validity of the interim order and the District Court of Limassol ruled in their favor as the applicant did not fulfilled the main conditions for granting the interim order. Accordingly, the key conditions of Article 32 are: there is a serious matter to be heard; there appears to be a probability of success; it will be difficult or impossible to do complete justice at a later stage without granting the injunction.

On 28/08/2020 the Court decided that the applicant showed neither the probability of success of his claim, that a constructive trust was created in his favor, nor that it would be difficult to do complete justice at a later stage. Regarding the third condition of Article 32 in particular, the court mentioned that since the applicant maintained in his written statement that he also used to save his contacts and clients’ information as back up in an external disc then his claim that he would have no communication whatsoever with his clients because he couldn’t access his work email, cannot be sustained. It is interesting to note that the court observed that the fact that the applicant was the only user of his personal work email does not mean that he also was the owner of that email address. Therefore, the Court ruled in favor of the defendant and cancelled the interim order.

Our Litigation Team was represented by our Partner and Head of the Litigation Department, Mr. Andreas M. Damianou.