Shopping With Specs

Breaking Law readers and regulars to this blog will know of my interest in fairness to consumers and the Waitrose car park clock at Richmond-upon-Thames and M&S fruit display in the same town (see http://www.breakinglaw.co.uk/search/label/nonsense). The clock, incidentally, was five minutes slow yesterday. It is true that the exit barrier was up so that it was possible to leave without tendering any money but there was nothing to suggest this was so on the machines which invited payment before the barrier is reached on another floor.

So what of the M&S fruit display? Well, they tell me that today is 6 October 2017 and if you examine the photographs above which I took this afternoon of the blackberries, white peaches and tomatoes shown opposite on display, you will see that they were all marked as best before....6 October 2017. I had to see a man about a dog and so did not have time to examine every item on display but three fruits in one store on the same day (and not for the first time) is bad enough. There is no suggestion that you would get a stomach ache if you consumed any of this fruit on or after today. But we expect a fruit which is not apparently marked down in price on account of its age to be at its best when we buy it. And we should not have to go shopping with a magnifying glass.  I'll see what M&S say about this and let you know.

Have a good weekend. And if you don't, well tough bananas but check the date.

Revenue Goes Overboard on Alleged £4 Mistake: Penalties Quashed

Tabrez Akhtar was a partner with another person in a newsagents and post office. He had to get the partnership tax return in by 31 October 2015. His accountant posted it first class on 31 October 2015. HMR&C (the Revenue) didn't log it as received until ten days later. Then nearly three months later they sent it back. Why? Because they claimed there had been an arithmetical error in that expenses had been overstated by £4. The tax consequence of this alleged error would have been the grand sum of less than £1 per partner. The return was redelivered to the Revenue by the accountant who disputed any arithmetical error. The Revenue imposed on Mr Akhtar a penalty of £100 because they claimed the return had not been in by 31 October plus a daily penalty totalling £560.

Mr Akhtar appealed against the penalties to the First-Tier Tribunal, Tax Chamber.* The penalties were recently quashed in their entirety. The Revenue had gone wrong in

• suggesting that the return had not been received by the 31 October, the Tribunal accepting that it was posted when the accountant said and so, effectively, the Revenue had sat on it.
• charging daily penalties on the basis that the return was not back in their hands until the accountant redelivered it when it was only out of their hands because they had chosen to send it back to the accountant.
• overlooking a statutory provision ( Taxes Management Act 1970 section  12ABB(1)) which allows the Revenue to correct "obvious errors or omissions in the return (whether errors of principle arithmetical mistakes or otherwise.)'
• giving misleading information to Mr Akhtar (and they are frequently criticised for this) about what it would take to get a penalty quashed on the ground that there was a reasonable excuse  ** for what had gone wrong.

I reckon that's enough. Incidentally, remember that if you want to submit your return by post and not on-line then you must do so by 31 October. Also, it's now possible to put in a tax appeal on-line (see https://www.gov.uk/tax-tribunal ).

* The case was Tabrez Akhtar trading as Crawley News and Post Office v Commissioners for Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs [2017] UKFTT 0651 (TC)
** A reasonable excuse is one which is genuine and objectively reasonable when you take into account the circumstances and attributes of the actual taxpayer.

Company Crashes: Can the Directors be held liable to creditors?

The crash of Monarch Airlines has raised the question Are the directors personally liable for  

the company's debts? I am not going to answer that one and nothing here should be taken to suggest that any of the Monarch directors bear personal responsibility for money owed to their customers and others. But what I am going to do is deal with the position of company directors generally when the business collapses. There's a chapter devoted to this in my book   Breaking Law but here's the law of England and Wales in a nutshell.

As a general rule, directors are not personally responsible for the debts or contract breaches of their company. A notable exception is someone who was a director at a time when they was disqualified from holding that position or had given an undertaking not to act as a director. But there are other exceptions. Where a director has been up to monkey business  - fraudulent or wrongful trading, they call it - before the company went bust, the liquidator can apply to the court for them to make a contribution towards company debts. Continuing to trade and take in money at a time when the director knew or ought to have known that the company had no reasonable prospect of avoiding collapse may be enough.

And for misconduct after 30 September 2015 there's a new attack which the secretary of state can make on behalf of creditors who have lost out under the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 where disqualification proceedings have been successfully brought against a director in relation to conduct which has caused the loss.  Disqualification proceedings can even be avoided on the strength of a director's undertaking to pay compensation to aggrieved creditors.

MasterCard Claim: Latest Part 2

Walter Merricks has decided to battle on (see http://www.breakinglaw.co.uk/2017/10/mastercard-claim-appeal-latest.html) and will be applying directly to the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal against the Competition Appeal Tribunal's dismissal of his claim.

MasterCard Claim: Appeal latest

The Competition Appeal Tribunal has just refused permission to Walter Merricks to appeal to the Court of Appeal in the massive MasterCard claim because no right of appeal existed and that any challenge to the dismissal of the claim had to be made by way of judicial review (see http://www.breakinglaw.co.uk/2017/08/mastercard-claim-dismissal-appeal.html).  But it went on to say that if it had had the jurisdiction to give permission, it would have refused it! To which court, if any, will Mr Merricks go next? Watch this space. 

New Debt Protocol. It's in force!!!

Creditors and debtors. Remember that how you behave towards each other is likely to be dictated by a new protocol that came into force YESTERDAY (see http://www.breakinglaw.co.uk/search/label/debt). Failure by a creditor to comply could lead to tears for them and some joy for the debtor.

The Business and Property Courts: Hello and Welcome!

The Business and Property Courts (BPC) began trading today which may turn you on if you are a lawyer or are about to start a civil case involving, say, the most difficult building dispute known to man which only a judge who breaths, eats and sleeps nails, foundations and pylons could ever understand. They have been created as a single umbrella for these specialist courts across England and Wales - the Commercial Court, the Admiralty Court, the Chancery Division Courts and the Technology and Construction Court which will continue to operate out of Rolls Building in London's Fetter Lane and is the largest specialist centre in the world for financial, business and property litigation. 

But not just Rolls Building. The BPC's work will also be dealt with at regional centres in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester. All work in and out of London will be divided into courts or lists, namely the Admiralty Court, the Business List (with Pensions and Financial Services and Regulation as sub-lists), the Commercial Court, the Circuit Commercial Courts (formerly the Mercantile Court), the Competition List, the Financial List, the Insolvency and Companies List, the Intellectual Property List (with the Patents Court and the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court being sub-lists), the Property, Trusts and Probate List, the Revenue List and the Technology and Construction Court. A claimant without a listing allergy must choose which BPC court, list or sub-list into which they should issue, based on the principal subject matter of the dispute as well as the appropriate location in which to issue. The claims will be given a claim number with a prefix reflecting the court, list or sub-list of issue. Existing claims will retain their numbers. The new arrangements are designed to make it easier to transfer claims between the Rolls Building and the regions.

Claims issued in the county court at Central London, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool and Preston (or, presumably, sent or transferred there) and relating to specialist work of the type undertaken in the BPC will be marked ‘Business and Property Work’ by the court on allocation if not already so marked by the claimant and will be managed and heard only by specialist judges. And those judges must spend at least 20% of their time handling the county court specialist work or BPC work. Among the excluded work will be building claims (other than adjudication claims) worth under £75,000, invoice and other straightforward business claims worth under £75,000, land trust claims not combined with other specialist claims, boundary and easement disputes involving no conveyancing issues and Inheritance Act claims.

The present procedural rules will still apply to the BPC and with claims being started under Parts 7 or 8 of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 (CPR). A new Practice Direction is being issued which is devoted to BPC work and will form part of the CPR 92nd update.

Those of you who are litigants in person, do bear in mind that the BPC is intended for the really big and complicated stuff. However, it may be that a county court claim demands the knowledge and experience of a specialist judge and, in that event, you may wish to start it  at or have it transferred to one of the county court centres mentioned above.