Summary
The claimant, Mr Morley, was domiciled in England. The defendant, Reiter, was a German company.
Mr Morley was suing for a breach of contract. The claim was related to the sale of Lamborghini Gallardo which was allegedly not fit for purpose due to oil starvation. The car was sold, together with a spare kit, for the sum of approximately €240,000. The car was delivered in Germany.
The proceedings were commenced by the claimant in England. The defendant challenged the English court’s jurisdiction. An important question was whether the car was to be delivered, under the contract, in England or Germany.
The English High Court upheld the defendant’s jurisdictional challenge. It was held that the claimant did not satisfy the test of good arguable case for establishing jurisdiction under Article 5(1) of Brussels I, and as a result the English court did not have jurisdiction. In this context, Mr Justice Briggs held: that:
“8 I was not shown a case where the good arguable test case was specifically applied to a claim for jurisdiction under Art.5. Since that article confers non-exclusive jurisdiction and does not therefore oust the jurisdiction of any other Member State, it might be thought that some slightly less rigorous standard had to be applied. Nonetheless, in Kolmar Group AG v Visen Industries Limited [2009] EWHC 3765 (QB) Flaux J said, at para 5, that the principle stated by Waller LJ in Canada Trust was of general application in relation to all matters going to jurisdiction, not limited to the particular requirements of Art.23. I agree, and I regard that analysis as flowing naturally from Lord Rodger's observations in the Bols case to which I have referred.
[…]
20 I place no reliance upon the provisions of the draft contract to which I have referred, providing for the buyer to have the obligation to collect the car in Germany. This is because the evidence that the written form of unsigned contract governed the parties' relationship falls well short of being persuasive. Rather, it seems to me that the surviving correspondence demonstrates that, whatever may have been discussed originally, the parties were, before the end of February, ad idem that delivery should take place on 15 March and, by 12 March at the very latest, agreed that this should be achieved by the claimant's agent collecting it from the defendant's works. The very fact that the car was in fact delivered in Germany, without any apparent complaint of breach of contract in that respect for more than three years, strongly suggests that this is what had by then been agreed” [8-20]