In prize law, the burden of proof rests on the claimant to demonstrate they have divested themselves of an enemy commercial domicile. Naturalization in a neutral state is insufficient if the party maintains material interests and an intention to resume business in the enemy state.

Lord Sumner :-

Although their Lordships do not find it necessary to call upon the Crown for any argument, they must not be understood to cast the smallest slight upon the argument which has been advanced to them on behalf of the appellant in so doing. Indeed, they wish to say that great assistance has been rendered to them by the brevity, the clearness and the good judgment which Mr. Mirza has displayed on behalf of his client; but their Lordships have come to the conclusion that there is no ground made out upon which they can interfere with the condemnation which was pronounced in the Court below.

The case is a claim in prize for the condemnation of the "Kara Deniz." It has been heard on two occasions. On the first the learned Judge found that the formalities of the transfer to the claimant appeared to be complete, but he had doubts, which the circumstances certainly seem to have warranted, whether the transaction might not have been a collusive one entered into for the purpose of assisting the Turkish Government, then an enemy of His Majesty, and accordingly the case was adjourned to give the claimant the opportunity of calling further evidence upon that point. Subsequently the case came on again, and a decree of condemnation was pronounced upon the ground that the claimant had, at the time of the capture and continuously thereafter, a commercial domicile, in Constantinople, and that he had never formed any intention or taken any steps, which had the effect of divesting him of that commercial domicile and adopting some other. If the decision that he had not done so, and had therefore retained his Turkish commercial domicile, was correct, it is not contended before their Lordships that the condemnation was not properly pronounced.

The question is one of fact, and depended in the first instance upon the evidence given as to the acts and intentions of the claimant. He was by race a Greek. He was a member of the Orthodox Greek Church, but was born in Constantinople a Turkish subject. About three years before the war he had been naturalised as a Persian subject, but he continued to carry on his business in Constantinople as before. In partnership with a Turkish subject he traded as a manager of shipping, and, in co-ownership sometimes with Turks and sometimes with Germans, and in one or two cases without any co-owners, he was owner of a number of vessels trading principally in the Black Sea, where they carried the Russian mails, and through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea, where they engaged in the pilgrim traffic to Mecca. This business he carried on upto the very eve of the outbreak of the war between Turkey and Great Britain. He happened then to be in the Piraeus in consequence of some trouble which one of his vessels, the 'Teheran," had got into. The imminence of war must have been obvious to him, as it was to everybody else, because his vessels had been employed in transporting troops for the Turkish Government, a service which they had rendered in time of peace for some years, but now were called on to render upon an exceptionally large scale.

In the autumn of 1914 mines had been laid in the Dardanelles, the traffic through the Straits was no longer conducted in the ordinary mode of times of peace, and it could hardly have been a surprise to him when, at the Piraeus, he learned that war had formally begun. He took an early opportunity of removing from the immediate area of war his wife and children, and brought them to the Piraeus. His Turkish partners he left in Constantinople. His material interests were there, because his ships, except the 'Teheran" and the "Kara Deniz," were in the hands of the Turkish Government, and his undertakings therefore continued as before in Constantinople, though they were seriously hampered, and perhaps brought to a standstill, by the war. He next devoted himself to the fortunes of the "Kara Deniz," which he had bought in the previous August. It may be assumed for present purposes that every