Author: Dennis Chapman
Published: April 15, 2013
Reading time: 2 minutes
This article is 12 years old.
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The Forint is the currency of Hungary and to an interesting case we’ve recently had to consider. A client sells a car in the UK whereupon 18 days later the buyer has driven it all the way to the land of the Goulash and alleged father of Granville from ‘Open All Hours’.
An off centre steering problem allegedly arose. Now, the least you’d expect is for the driver to have it repaired but not so our intrepid traveller, for he simply chose to leave it in Hungary and is requesting/demanding that our client both recover it and repair it. Does he have to?
Well, irrespective of any potential right of repair, it was felt that the answer to the recovery is an outright ‘no’. The law says that only those losses that are reasonably foreseeable are recoverable for a breach of contract and I don’t think what has happened here could have been reasonably foreseen.
Additionally, there would have been an obligation on the buyer to take reasonable steps to keep to a minimum any losses incurred through a breach of contract. What the buyer did (or more to the point did not do) here very much suggests that he did nothing in that regard.
