On 21 October 2024 judgment was handed down following the liability trial, in a long-running claim brought by Domestic & General (“D&G”) against a variety of rogue trader businesses and individuals controlling those companies.
A copy of the judgment can be found here.
The claim is based on the economic torts of causing loss by unlawful means and unlawful means conspiracy. It arises out of a pattern of unlawful conduct whereby rogue traders cold call prospective customers and trick them into believing that they are calling from the existing provider of the customer’s home appliance cover. The unlawful means relied upon for the purpose of both torts was the deceit perpetrated on the customer, which caused D&G to suffer loss.
The claim was first issued in early 2021 and has involved three separate interim injunction applications, and two applications for contempt of court, which were all successful.
At trial, the Judge (Mr Justice Lavender) upheld D&G’s claims against the principal corporate and individual defendants, based on both tortious claims.
The claim represents a novel application of the tort of causing loss by unlawful means and required the Judge to grapple with the issue of whether the requirement for the customer’s “freedom to deal with” D&G had been sufficiently interfered with, to satisfy one of the key elements of the tort (per the leading authority of OBG v Allan). The Judge held that there had been such interference on the facts, noting that the requisite threshold was not that the third party’s freedom had been “completely overborne” (see [214]-[227] of the Judgment).
The Judge also upheld D&G’s claim that one of the corporate defendants (UKSP) that was joined to the proceedings in late 2022 had been established to continue the business operations that had previously been conducted by the first and third defendants (see [69]-[101] of the Judgment), after those defendants had been made subject to an interim injunction order in January 2021. In effect, UKSP was a “phoenix entity” that had been established to circumvent the Court’s interim injunction.
Nick Goodfellow and Bláthnaid Breslin acted for D&G at trial, instructed by D&G’s in-house legal team. They have been ably assisted during the litigation by other Littleton members, Stuart Sanders, Sophie Cashell and Asfandyar Qureshi.
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