KWABENA DONKOR v. R. D. DODOO

Judgment:

In this case the plaintiff, a man by the name of Kwabena Donkor, seeks, amongst other things, to eject the defendant R. D. Dodoo from the occupation and possession of the property described in the Statement of Claim.

The history of the property is as follows. The plaintiff on the 17th September, 1943, bought the property from one Cecilia Dedei Atta who had acquired the right, title and interest of one David Mensah Tagoe when his property was distrained upon by one of his creditors.

The case is as usual complicated by the fact that the various parties concerned were related, and that a mutual relation of the defendant and Cecilia Dedei Atta took a most active part in all the proceedings. His name is H. A. K. Nelson. In addition to being a relation of Cecilia Dedei Atta, Nelson at one time had acted as the trusted agent of the defendant in that he was in possession of a sum of £611 which had been inherited by the defendant on the death of his brother.

(The court then disposed of the first ground of the defence, and continued:)

There is, however, a second defence which is to this effect: that the defendant, at some time before 1934 (when Madam Atta bought the right, title and interest in the property) lent the sum of £97 to Mensah Tagoe who undoubtedly was the owner of the property in question at the time of the loan. To secure this debt, Tagoe gave to the defendant the Title Deeds in connection with the property, and the defendant went into possession of the property, taking the rents which he obtained from three or four tenants by way of interest on his money. When the defendant moved to another part of the country, he appointed one Kofi Dove, a relation of his, as his agent to collect the rents, retaining for himself a room where his goods and chattels were kept. This sum of £97 has never been repaid.

The position, therefore, when Madam Atta bought, was that the defendant was in possession of the Title Deeds: he had a room in the house with his goods and chattels, and his agent was collecting the rents from which it is argued that the purchaser Madam Atta had constructive notice of his equitable interest, and in support of this argument Counsel quotes from Dart's Treatise on the Law and Practice relating to Vendors and Purchasers of Real Estate, 7th Edition, Vol. II at page 884 which reads as follows:-

'Notice of the land, being in the occupation of a person other

than the vendor, is notice to a purchaser that the person in possession has