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John Adair and Sean Pierce, together with co-counsel Anil Kapoor, represented Dr. Saad Aljabri, a former high ranking official in the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in an application brought in the Federal Court by the Attorney General of Canada. The Attorney General sought an order confirming a statutory prohibition under s. 38 of the Canada Evidence Act on the disclosure of information that could be potentially injurious to Canada’s international relations, national defence, or national security. The information at issue relates to a multi-billion underlying civil proceeding on the Commercial List of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice involving allegations of fraud against Dr. Saad Aljabri.

The Federal Court granted the Attorney General’s application in part, finding that that disclosure of the information would be injurious to Canada’s national security, but concluded that the public interest in disclosure of some of the information outweighed the public interest in non-disclosure, and that any injury could be mitigated with non-injurious summaries of that information.