Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
MISTAKEN IDENTITY, CONTRACT FORMATION AND CUTTING THE GORDIAN KNOT
Shogun Finance
v. Hudson
In Shogun Finance Ltd
v. Hudson
1
a rogue fraudulently posed as a Mr Durlabh Patel of Leicester and obtained possession of a Mitsubishi Shogun motor car from a dealer for an agreed price of £22,250 pursuant to a hire-purchase agreement ostensibly concluded with Shogun. The rogue subsequently sold the vehicle for £17,000 to Mr Hudson, a good faith private purchaser. The facts of Shogun
classically illustrate the uncomfortable intersection of contract and property law and the intractable (and enduring) problem of how to allocate between two innocent parties who have been the victim of fraud, the risk of that fraud. The failure of English property law to regard the transfer of possession of property from the original owner to a rogue as creating an estoppel in an action against a good faith purchaser may be contrasted with the position of such persons in other jurisdictions.2
The vulnerability of innocent third party purchasers under English law3
has been the subject of regular judicial critique4
and a Law Reform Committee Report.5
In practice, in cases such as Shogun
, competing interests in property are decided through an application of principles of contract as opposed to property law. In Shogun
itself, Mr Hudson’s right to keep the vehicle depended on whether the contract between the rogue and Shogun was void for a mistake of identity or merely voidable for fraud.
As a principle of property law, no title may be obtained in respect of goods under a hire-purchase agreement until the option to purchase is exercised.6
Consequently, by reason of the nemo dat quod non habet
rule, title to hire-purchase goods cannot be passed to an innocent third party purchaser. However, the good faith private purchaser of a second hand motor vehicle, who is especially vulnerable in this context,7
may obtain good title to the vehicle from the debtor under the hire-purchase agreement by virtue of the Hire Purchase Act 1964 s 27.8
It was on this statutory provision that Mr Hudson was seeking to rely in
1. Shogun Finance Ltd
v. Hudson
[2003] UKHL 62; [2003] 3 WLR 1371.
2. See the US Uniform Commercial Code (14th edn), § 2–403; German Civil Code, Art 932.
3. The principle of nemo dat quod non habet
(as codified by the Sale of Goods Act 1979, s 21) safeguards the rights of the owner in a three party dispute but is subject to a limited number of statutory and common law exceptions.
4. See eg Devlin LJ’s dissent in Ingram
v. Little
[1961] 1 QB 31, Lord Denning MR’s judgment in Lewis
v. Averay
[1972] 1 QB 198 and the dissents of Lords Nicholls of Birkenhead and Millett in the House of Lords in Shogun
.
5. Twelfth Report, Transfer of Title to Chattels
; Cmnd 2958 (1966).
6. Helby
v. Matthews
[1895] AC 471.
7. I. Davies, “Wrongful Dispositions of Motor Vehicles in England, Australia and New Zealand: A Common Dilemma for the Common Law” (1995) 8 JCL 209.
8. As substituted by the Consumer Credit Act 1974.
CASE AND COMMENT
293