Buttle v Saunders

Buttle v Saunders [1950] 2 All ER 193 is an English trusts law case, which held that a trustee has a duty to gazump, or break an agreement which has not quite been completed into a formal and binding contract.

Buttle v Saunders
CourtHigh Court
Citation(s)[1950] 2 All ER 193
Keywords
Fiduciary duty, gazumping

Facts

The defendant trustee agreed to sell Mrs Simpson some land for £6,142. A beneficiary of the trust then offered £6,500 for the same land. The trustee refused, since he had already come to an informal agreement with Mrs Simpson. The beneficiary applied for an injunction against the sale to Mrs Simpson, alleging the duty was to obtain the highest price.

Judgment

Wynn-Parry J granted the injunction saying,

The only consideration which was present to their minds was that they had gone so far in the negotiations with Mrs Simpson that they could not properly, from the point of view of commercial morality, resile from those negotiations.

gollark: Any good terrorist could surely just bomb the large amount of people in the "security" queues.
gollark: They run you through a bunch of scanning and disallow any "dangerous" thing for no specified reason. It's like someone thought "hmm, how can we make people not want to do air travel?".
gollark: Oh, another wasteful government thing is airport "security".
gollark: Oh.
gollark: Wasps are basically bees, right?

See also

Notes

    References
        This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.