Tort

Conspiracy - defendants' unlawful acts constituting individual torts - claim for conspiracy to injure by unlawful means separately actionableKuwait Oil Tanker Co SAK and another v Al Bader and others: CA (Nourse, Potter and Clarke LJJ): 18 May 2000

The claimants, group companies based in Kuwait, had employed the three defendants.

Consequent on events between 1985 and 1992 the claimants brought an action in England claiming substantial damages against the defendants for conspiracy to injure by unlawful means.

The judge allowed the claim holding that each defendant had acted dishonestly over a long period defrauding the claimants and that each was a party to a single actionable conspiracy wrongly to misappropriate the claimants' assets.

He rejected, among other things, the defendants' case that since the unlawful means were themselves actionable against each of them as joint tortfeasors, the conspiracy merged in the tort and was not separately actionable.

The defendants appealed.Stanley Brodie QC and Robert Howe (instructed by Olswang) for the first defendant.

The second defendant did not appear and was not represented.

Stanley Brodie QC and Selwyn Bloch (instructed by Brian Harris & Co) for the third defendant.

Julian Malins QC, Richard Slade and Jonathan Adkin (instructed by Shaw and Croft) for the claimants.Held, dismissing the appeals by the first and second defendants and allowing in part the third defendant's appeal, that where the unlawful acts relied on amounted to individual torts committed by joint tortfeasors there was no doctrine of merger preventing the claimants from bringing an action for conspiracy; that the conspiracy action, appropriately describing the claimants' true position in the fairest and most sensible way, had been properly brought; but that the damages awarded against the third defendant would be reduced.