The plaintiff had sued the defendant accountants for negligently understating their business profits by inflating the figure for creditors. As a result, further tax had to be paid. The plaintiffs claimed the penalties and interest on tax paid exacted by the Inland Revenue Department. The plaintiff appealed a finding that he knew of the overstatement of creditors.
Held: Where a trial judge had merely rehearsed the evidence without putting it into a coherent narrative or listing issues and stating and weighing the facts found, and the case was a complex and difficult one, the only proper remedy was to order a re-trial. The judge had failed to to put in place ‘the building blocks of the reasoned judicial process’
Henry LJ noted that whilst Mr Heffer had obviously been an attractive and persuasive witness, ‘it was crucial to test his evidence against the objective facts, the contemporaneous documents, the motives of those involved, or the lack of them, and the overall probability.’ The trial Judge had not done this: ‘there was no proper reasoned reappraisal of the Judge’s initial view of credibility against the commercial probabilities, and no proper examination of the issues raised by the contemporary documents’. The documents had been looked at, but they had not been given a consideration which was ‘proper, detailed, and dispassionate.’
Judges:
Henry LJ
Citations:
Times 28-Dec-1998
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – White v White CA 21-Jun-2001
A family had occupied a council house. They purchased the property under the right to buy scheme, with financial assistance from a son, who having paid the mortgage was to allow his parents to live in the house, but then it was to become his. The . .
Cited – Pharmacy Care Systems Limited v The Attorney General 16-Aug-2004
(Court of Appeal of New Zealand) The claimant had settled a dispute with a Health Authority which alleged it had overclaimed for pharmacy supplies. It now claimed that the settlement should be set aside as having been entered into under duress. . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Litigation Practice
Updated: 10 May 2022; Ref: scu.81303
