Space exploration company Excalibur Almaz has won an appeal to bring an injunction preventing a Japanese entrepreneur from pursuing a fraud claim against them.

The claim involving such an allegation of space age fraud was the first case of its kind to be dealt with by the Manx courts.

In August Deemster Andrew Corlett refused island-based Excalibur Almaz’s application for the interim anti-suit injunction against Takafumi Horie.

But the appeal court has overturned that decision, and dismissed Mr Horie’s cross-appeal, ruling there was an ’absence of any strong reason not to grant the anti-suit injunction’.

Until 2015, Excalibur Almaz stored two former Soviet space stations and a space capsule in a hangar at Jurby industrial estate.

Mr Horie lodged a claim in a court in Texas in November 2014 alleging fraud, negligence and breach of fiduciary duty against Excalibur Almaz chairman and Texas attorney Art Dula, associate attorney in Dula’s law office Anat Friedman and business partner John Buckner Hightower.

The Japanese entrepreneur alleged that he was fraudulently induced into investing $49m into a space travel enterprise when in reality, he claims, there never was and never would be any such business.

His claims are denied by Excalibur Almaz and Messrs Dula, Friedman and Hightower.

They point out Mr Horie has signed a legal document four and a half years earlier in which he agreed not to sue Excalibur Almaz.

The deed of assignment and settlement, dated June 2010, discharged the company from any claim ’whether known or unknown, suspected or unsuspected, contingent or actual, however and whenever arising in whatever capacity and jurisdiction’.

And any dispute or claim arising out of the deed had to be dealt with in the Manx courts.

Mr Horie, for his part, maintained the deed had nothing to do with the alleged breaches.