Destine Estates Ltd & Anor v Muir & Anor
2014
CHANCERY DIVISION
United Kingdom
CORAM
- MR JUSTICE NEWEY
Areas of Law
- Contract Law
- Equity and Trusts
- Evidence Law
- Property and Real Estate Law
- Civil Procedure
2014
CHANCERY DIVISION
United Kingdom
CORAM
AI Generated Summary
The claimants sought to recover £225,000 alleged to have been lent for the purchase of Chowle Farmhouse. The defendants argued that the loan and charge deeds were forged or invalid due to misrepresentation or undue influence. The court held that the deeds were properly executed and that the defendants owed the claimants £225,000. The defendants' arguments of forgery, misrepresentation, undue influence, and non est factum were dismissed. The court also found that the defendants owed the principal sum without interest.
Judgment
Mr Justice Newey :
In this case, the claimants seek to recover the sum of £225,000 which, they allege, was lent to the defendants when the first defendant, Mrs Janet Muir (“Mrs Muir”), bought a property known as Chowle Farmhouse in Great Coxwell, Oxfordshire.
The main protagonists
Mr Crossley Cooke
Mr David Crossley Cooke, the second claimant, is now in his mid-70s and retired. He formerly farmed, but he has also been involved in numerous business ventures. Many, though not all, of these have involved property, sometimes on a sizeable scale. His business interests have largely been run from the Estate Office on the Little Coxwell Estate in Oxfordshire, which is close to Chowle Farmhouse and, I gather, in the ownership of Mr Crossley Cooke’s family.
Mr Crossley Cooke’s career has had its ups and downs. In 1968, he was bankrupted, and much more recently, in late 2010, he entered into an individual voluntary arrangement (“IVA”).
I was told of several other pieces of litigation in which Mr Crossley Cooke has been involved. The earliest of these involved proceedings in which Mr Crossley Cooke sought possession of some flats in a block in Chelsea. When dealing with costs, His Honour Judge Phelan, sitting in the West London County Court, said that he had concluded that “Mr Crossley-Cooke on balance appears not to be a person whose word is to be trusted”. When the matter reached the Court of Appeal in July 1990, Staughton LJ observed that Mr Crossley Cooke had based his belief that he had a prospect of success in the actions on “tenuous material which objectively may not have justified it”. A second case arose from the service of a statutory demand on Mr Crossley Cooke in 2009. A district judge declined to set the demand aside, but Roth J allowed an appeal from that decision (see Crossley-Cooke v Europanel (UK) Ltd [2010] EWHC 124 (Ch) , [2010] BPIR 561 ). In the course of his judgment, Roth J noted that Mr Crossley Cooke, who had appeared before him in person, had accepted that, “with hindsight”, it would have been sensible to make contact with the alleged creditor about a cheque in its favour that he had stopped. Finally, Mr Crossley Cooke played a part in a claim that a Mr and Mrs Horsey brought against a company called Gale Valley Limited. This turned on whether a particular area of land had been sold to the Horseys. Mr Crossley Cooke took the view that it had not, but His Honour Judge Denyer QC, sitting in the Bristol County Court, decided