Category: Litigation & Disputes

The High Court in the case of Marcura Equities FZE & Anor v Nisomar Ventures Ltd & Anor has ruled that it was not disproportionate for a party to spend up to £450,000 to recover £35,000 because it achieved other, non-monetary relief too.

Nicholas Vineall QC, sitting as a deputy High Court judge, said it was wrong to focus solely on the damages in the circumstances, although in any case it was not a nominal sum.

The case related to the alleged unlawful disclosure and use of confidential information. All the issues settled on the eve of trial save the costs.

The defendants paid £35,000 and were required to deliver up all property within their control that belonged to the claimants, and not to disclose it to third parties, and also to provide witness statements setting out, among other things, what confidential information had been received and used. There was no admission of liability.

Judge Vineall decided that the claimants substantively achieved all of the relief they had claimed, except for a springboard injunction. The claimants had also sought damages or an account of profit. That claim was never quantified, although the claim form sought damages in excess of £200,000.

“I therefore consider that this is not a case in which I should decline to make any order in relation to costs. It also follows that the starting point must be that the defendants should pay the claimants’ costs.”

As a result, the judge ordered that the claimants recover the whole of their costs, subject to detailed assessment.

Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business. Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf. Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 (Option 6) or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.

The National Audit Office have warned that law chiefs will fail to complete their digital courts revolution in time and on budget. It says HM Courts & Tribunals Services faces a ‘daunting challenge’ in meeting target for technological and cultural change.

The Ministry of Justice wants to vastly reduce the number of physical court hearings, cut its workforce by roughly 50% and introduce national centres to handle all centralised case management and administration. The six-year project is due to be completed in 2022.

The NAO notes that the government has already extended the original completion date by two years with no change in the £1.2bn budget.

The report says: ‘HMCTS faces a daunting challenge in delivering the scale of technological and cultural change necessary to modernise the administration of justice, and achieve the savings required. It has responded to early concerns by extending the timetable and improving its governance and programm management. But there is a long way to go to achieve the planned transformation and overall HMCTS is behind where it expected to be at this stage.’

Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business. Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf. Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 (Option 6) or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.

Consumer champion and the journalist behind ‘MoneySavingExpert‘ Martin Lewis, is suing Facebook for defamation after it failed to tackle “dodgy” adverts that used his face and website to sell dubious financial products.

Lewis claims that Facebook has failed to remove or prevent the adverts from appearing on its site. He also claims that the false adverts are not only damaging to his reputation but have also persuaded victims to invest their money into scams.

He said that he would donate any damages awarded to anti-fraud and fake news charities.

The adverts used titles such as “Bitcoin code” and “Cloud trader” to encourage people to invest their savings into a range of “get rich schemes”.

Although he has repeatedly contacted Facebook to complain, Lewis claims that the company has failed to take action and that he has faced reputational damage as a consequence.

Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business. Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf. Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.

Victims of crime who believe that they were facilitated by online platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, should sue the social media in the civil courts, according to Shaun Sawyer, Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall Police.

Sawyer, was quoted in the Sunday Times newspaper. He claimed that the internet has become “a safe space for organised crime”, helping criminals to coordinate their activities and, often, to intimidate their victims.

He said that criminals are able to get away with this because they are protected by “liberal” internet rules. He is now urging members of the public to take the world’s internet giants – Facebook, Google, Apple, Snap and others – to court for abusing their position.

The Chief Constable suggested that criminals are avoiding punishment because technology companies are not doing enough to stop online abuse. ”

In the newspaper interview, Sawyer said these companies are “very good” at creating technical solutions that can assist law enforcement officials. However, many companies are simply choosing not to assist police forces.

“Their algorithms should be able to spot regular visitors, every contact leaves a trace, they have all the IP addresses,” said Sawyer.

Is he right?

Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business. Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf. Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.

A businessman has won the first ever “right to be forgotten” lawsuit against Google in London’s High Court – but a second man’s attempt to have embarrassing search results about him deleted has failed.

The two men were referred to as NT1 and NT2 during the trial. Both had sued Google under data protection laws demanding that search results including references to past criminal convictions be erased.

NT1 was found guilty of conspiracy to account falsely in the late 1990s and was jailed, following his involvement with an occasionally controversial property business that dealt with members of the public. He demanded the deletion of three search results that mentioned his conviction.

Similarly, NT2 was involved in “a controversial business that was the subject of public opposition over its environmental practices” in the early part of 2000 – and the public opposition attracted significant media coverage. He was also sentenced to prison, spending six weeks in custody.

Both men made their claims under British and EU data protection laws. Their grounds for demanding the deletion of the search results were that some of the results were allegedly inaccurate, while all of them were in breach of the so-called Right To Be Forgotten, established after an EU court ruling in 2014 that a Spanish man was entitled to have search results about his criminal past deleted.

Dismissing NT1’s application to have the search results deleted, Mr Justice Warby ruled:

The crime and punishment information is not information of a private nature. It was information about business crime, its prosecution, and its punishment. It was and is essentially public in its character. NT1 did not enjoy any reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of the information at the time of his prosecution, conviction and sentence. My conclusion is that he is not entitled to have it delisted now.

The judge also said that NT1 had “misled” the court during proceedings.

However, for NT2, who won his effort to have the search results about him deleted. The Judge ruled that one of the results, a national newspaper story, was “out of date, irrelevant and of no sufficient legitimate interest to users of Google Search to justify its continued availability, so that an appropriate delisting order should be made… NT2 has frankly acknowledged his guilt, and expressed genuine remorse. There is no evidence of any risk of repetition. His current business activities are in a field quite different from that in which he was operating at the time.”

Google argued that both cases were effectively libel claims brought through the back door of data protection law and were therefore an abuse of process, which the Judge dismissed. The Judge also threw out Google’s efforts to rely on the journalism exemption in section 32 of the Data Protection Act, in which Google tried claiming that the provision of search results is a journalistic endeavour.

Mr Justice Warby also observed that neither NT1 nor NT2 were “… asking to ‘be forgotten’. The first aspect of their claims asserts a right not to be remembered inaccurately.”

Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business. Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf. Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.

Facebook investors are suing the social media giant following news that data firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly used data from 50m Facebook users to target American voters in the 2016 election. The news has sent its shares plummeting by almost £50bn.

US court filings show that shareholders now want to sue the business over “significant losses and damages” as a result of the scandal.

Fan Yuan, the investor who filed the suit on behalf of those who bought shares in Facebook between February 2017 and March 2018, claims Facebook has made “materially false and misleading statements” and alleges that it violated its own data privacy policies by allowing a third party to access personal data.

The document does not disclose the number of shareholders but says there could be “hundreds or thousands” involved in the lawsuit.

Damian Collins MP, chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, wrote to Facebook’s billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg calling on him to give evidence on the data breach in Westminster. An old transcript of Mr Zuckerberg calling people “dumb f***s” for submitting personal information to the site have also resurfaced in the wake of the row.
Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business.

Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf. Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.

Chelsea Football Club can start work on a new £1bn stadium at Stamford Bridge after settling a dispute with a neighbour who objected to the construction.

The Crosthwaite family took out an injunction in May 2017, saying the expansion to 60,000 seats would block light into their home.

In January, Hammersmith and Fulham Council passed a motion to prevent the injunction blocking the plans.

The club said on Wednesday they have reached an agreement with the family.
Chelsea expect to be playing at Stamford Bridge until the end of the 2019-20 season and will be forced to play at an alternative venue – likely to be Wembley Stadium – for up to four years during construction.

Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business. Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf.

Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.

TV presenter Noel Edmonds is suing the Lloyds Banking Group for £73m for what he claims was the destruction of his business empire together with public humiliation and damage to his reputation caused by the fraudulent activities of the bank’s HBOS Reading arm.

He alleges that he “suffered immense economic loss as well as ‘distress and inconvenience’ at the hands of the bank as a direct result of the actions of the individuals involved in the fraud.

Six people were jailed last year after a jury heard they spent the proceeds of their fraudulent activities on superyachts and sex parties, while destroying businesses they had lent money to. Among them was the former HBOS banker Mark Dobson, who was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison.

Lloyds has set aside £100m to compensate 64 victims of the HBOS Reading fraud, although this sum may need to be increased if Edmonds is successful in his claim against the bank for fraudulent activities that took place between 2003 and 2007.

The biggest part of the claim is £50m to cover the losses he incurred when his business, Unique Group, collapsed. Edmonds says the bankers’ actions destroyed the entertainment firm and robbed him of future growth.

He is also claiming £12m for loss of speaking fees, £100,000 for “pain, suffering and damage” to his reputation and £750,000 in legal fees.

Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business. Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf. Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.

The courts service (HMCTS) spent £50m last year on agency and contract staff; it spent less than £4m in 2010, whilst more than 220 courts across England and Wales have closed.

Part of the increase appears to be linked to a £1bn court modernisation programme aimed at transferring more court hearings online or operating them through remote video-links. More than £30m is being spent on external management consultants.

Critics have said spending tens of millions of pounds more on agency staff is a false economy and a reckless use of resources.

Last week the MoJ revealed that a further eight courts had been earmarked for sale. These are Wandsworth county court and Blackfriars crown court in London, and magistrates’ courts in Cambridge, North Allerton, Banbury, Maidenhead, Chorley and Fleetwood.

Suffering a financial or contractual dispute can have serious implications on your business. Our business solicitors will quickly and efficiently put your case together and act on your behalf. Call Shalish Mehta in our civil and commercial litigation department on 0161 624 6811 or email sm@wrigleyclaydon.com. We can advise you on the appropriate course of action and assist with any legal documents or proceedings that may occur.