The plaintiff had bought shares in a company promoted by the defendant. The prospectus was fraudulent having failed to mention certain contracts which made the shares valueless.
Held: The shares being worthless, the plaintiff was entitled to have his price repaid.
Cockburn CJ said: ‘If a man buys a horse, as a racehorse, on the false representation that it has won some great race, while in reality it is a horse of very inferior speed, and he pays ten or twenty times as much as the horse is worth, and after the buyer has got the animal home it dies of some latent disease inherent in its system at the time he bought it, he may claim the entire price he gave; the horse was by reason of the latent mischief worthless when he bought; but if it catches some disease and dies, the buyer cannot claim the entire value of the horse, which he is no longer in a condition to restore, but only the difference between the price he gave and the real value at the time he bought.’
Cockburn CJ
(1877) 2 CPD 469, [1877] UKLawRpCP 43
Commonlii
Companies Act 1867 38
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Smith New Court Securities Ltd v Scrimgeour Vickers HL 21-Nov-1996
The defendant had made misrepresentations, inducing the claimant to enter into share transactions which he would not otherwise have entered into, and which lost money.
Held: A deceitful wrongdoer is properly liable for all actual damage . .
Cited – McConnel v Wright CA 24-Jan-1903
In an action by a shareholder in a limited company against a director for damages for misrepresentation in the prospectus, the time at which the damage is ordered to be assessed, is the date of the allotment to the plaintiff; accordingly, where the . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Damages, Contract
Leading Case
Updated: 02 November 2021; Ref: scu.191171