UK Supreme Court Justice Flags Two Legal Gaps at VIFC Lecture

On 25 August 2026 — one day after the UK and Vietnam held a governmental working session on the VIFC Specialized Court's design — a sitting Justice of the UK Supreme Court stood in a Saigon ballroom and told an audience of practitioners exactly what is still missing. The Loseby Lecture 2026, organized by BritCham Vietnam and Dragon Capital at the Hilton Saigon, produced the most specific public assessment yet of the VIFC's legal gaps, and the verdict carried two specific findings that every institution with capital committed to the centre needs to understand.

The Risk-Premium Argument#

Lord Richard Snowden, Justice of the UK Supreme Court, delivered the keynote on common law's role in reducing the cost of capital. The argument, according to Vietnamese-language reporting from the event, and translated here, is mechanical rather than abstract: legal uncertainty forces investors to demand extra return to compensate for unquantifiable enforcement risk. Where that uncertainty is large enough, the deal does not happen at all. The risk premium is not a theory — it is the spread between what a lender charges in a jurisdiction with predictable courts and what it charges without them.

Snowden identified collective enforcement mechanisms — insolvency procedures — as the most consequential gap in Vietnam's IFC legal system. The precise scope of the gap, whether it refers to the Specialized Court's own procedural rules or to Vietnam's broader bankruptcy law, was not fully distinguished in the Vietnamese-language reporting from the event. The reporting left that question open — a gap practitioners at the event may have noticed from the floor.

For secured lenders, the practical consequence is direct. A lender extending credit inside the VIFC against financial collateral needs to know what happens when the borrower cannot pay — who controls the process, in what sequence, under what law. Without specified collective enforcement rules, that recovery path is undefined, and an undefined recovery path is priced into spreads or eliminated from the deal structure.

The Day-1 Imperative#

Andrew Oldland KC, who leads TheCityUK's IFC Working Group, reviewed three decades of IFC court development across the DIFC, AIFC, and Hong Kong. His conclusion, as reported from the lecture, was unambiguous: the Specialized Court must be fully operational from Day 1. It cannot be treated as a phase-two deliverable.

The comparative evidence Oldland marshalled is instructive. Each of those courts recruited its bench predominantly from senior UK judiciary and barristers, supplemented by judges from Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Over time, locally trained civil-law judges learned to apply common-law principles — a realistic capacity-building pathway, Oldland noted, that Vietnam can follow. But the starting condition in every case was a functioning court on opening day, not a promised court.

Law 150, passed in December 2025, authorises foreign judges to sit on the VIFC Specialized Court. The bench, six months later, remains unconstituted. Oldland's point, framed in comparative terms, is that this sequencing — law first, bench later — is the deviation from established IFC practice, and the deviation carries a cost.

What the Panel Left Unresolved#

The lecture's panel sessions surfaced additional gaps without resolving them. Two are worth tracking.

Real property as IFC collateral. The ability of a foreign lender to take security over HCMC or Thu Thiem assets in VIFC-booked transactions remains an open question. If it cannot be done reliably, real-estate-backed financing structures cannot be safely written through the centre — a constraint that would exclude real-estate-backed financing structures entirely from the centre's transaction menu, in a city whose Grade A office and commercial property is almost entirely within the VIFC zone.

Specialist Court and International Arbitration Centre coordination. Decree 328 gives VIFC parties the ability to lock in arbitral finality, but the enforcement pathway runs through the Specialized Court. Arbitral awards that cannot be enforced via a functioning court default to the Vietnamese civil court system — the outcome international counterparties are specifically trying to avoid by choosing the VIFC.

The UK Engagement Cluster#

The lecture did not occur in isolation. It sits third in a visible sequence: on 20 August, SBV Governor Pham Duc An met UK Ambassador Iain Frew; on 24 August, UK and Vietnamese government officials held a working session on VIFC Specialized Court design; on 25 August, the Loseby Lecture assembled the judicial and private-sector practitioner layer. A Hanoi edition of the lecture was reported to be scheduled for 26 August.

The UK's Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with Vietnam provides the structural context. The participation of Prof. Dennis Novy, FCDO Chief Economist in HCMC, as welcome speaker marked the event as UK government-backed rather than a purely commercial gathering.

Dominic Scriven, Dragon Capital's Chairman and co-organiser of the lecture, framed the investor perspective directly: legal clarity, consistency, and predictability are the foundations that enable long-term strategic planning and committed capital allocation. Denzel Eades, BritCham Vietnam Chairman, added that an independent judiciary is non-negotiable for international investor trust, and that the UK business community is prepared to share expertise in commercial law, dispute resolution, and regulatory development.

UK law firms and their clients stand to benefit materially if the VIFC adopts common law and English-language proceedings — the court's design choices, before the bench is constituted, are the moment when that influence is exercised.

What Comes Next#

The gap between Vietnam's existing commitments — the VIFC has attracted approximately $21B in pledges — and actual deployed transactions is partly a legal-certainty gap. The two findings from the Loseby Lecture translate into two concrete monitors.

First: whether collective enforcement and insolvency rules appear in the Specialized Court's operational regulations before the bench is constituted. The rules need to precede the bench, not follow it. Second: whether the bench is constituted at all before the VIFC's formal operational launch — the Day-1 test Oldland drew from three decades of IFC precedent.

The National Assembly's oversight session already identified legal-stack gaps. The Loseby Lecture named two of them with greater specificity, from a sitting UK Supreme Court Justice and a senior practitioner with 30 years of IFC court experience, than any previous public forum. Institutions deciding now whether to convert pledges into transaction documents have a clearer picture of what remains unfinished — and a tighter timeframe in which to watch for it to change.