JUDGMENT OF AMISSAH J.A.
Amissah J.A. delivered the judgment of the court. This is a tragedy of errors. The real appellants in this case are the Norwich Union Fire Insurance Society Ltd. who shall henceforth be referred to simply as the insurance company. They complain of a judgment given against them, as insurers of a vehicle which was involved in an accident, by Bannerman J. Just as in the case of State Insurance Corporation v. Mansah [1968] G.L.R. 1127, C.A. which we have disposed of this morning, the claim against the insurance company was brought pursuant to a judgment obtained in a previous action brought by the present respondent against the insured of the insurance company. But several features of this case set it apart from that other.
The respondent brought his original action against one J. K. Yeboah and J. & G. Sarkis for damage done to his vehicle, not for personal injury either by itself or resulting in death. According to the respondent, his vehicle was parked at a workshop off the road when it was hit and damaged by another vehicle. This latter vehicle had the distinction of being in the name of J. K. Yeboah and insured in the name of J. & G. Sarkis, a fact which, we shall presently see, was to present its own peculiar problems. The respondent alleged that Yeboah and J. & G. Sarkis were negligent in allowing the use of a defective motor vehicle, and that this was the cause of the accident. The respondent got judgment for £G620 with £G84 costs. But, and [p.1140] here the difficulty arising out of the separation of ownership from insurance already begins to assert itself, the award was made against the owner of the offending vehicle, namely, Yeboah, and not J. & G. Sarkis, who were absolved of all responsibility. Although it is not clearly stated in the judgment, it nevertheless appears that Yeboah was fixed with liability because he was vicariously responsible for the action of the driver of his vehicle. But the case of J. & G. Sarkis was that they had owned the vehicle some three years prior to the accident but they sold it to Yeboah and had had nothing to do with the vehicle since. Contrary to what appeared in the current insurance policy covering the vehicle the time of the accident, they had not insured the vehicle since they sold it to Yeboah. The learned judge must have been impressed by this case because he found that the claim against J. & G. Sarkis must fail.
It is obvious that a judgment in these terms would present almost i
