Recent court decisions have signaled the English courts’ willingness to embrace multi-claimant litigation and to broaden the types of questions decided on a collective basis. These.
In a significant development for environmental litigation in the U.K., the English Court of Appeal has allowed a £5 billion damages claim brought by around 200,000 Brazilian individuals.
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On 11 December 2020, the U.K. Supreme Court (the Court) handed down its much-awaited ruling in
Merricks v Mastercard,
2 decision in a 3-2 ruling. The main aspects of the decision are explained below:
This ruling revives the possibility of a claim by 46.2 million individuals in the U.K. for alleged losses spanning over 16 years across all retail sectors in the U.K. economy, valued at £14 billion.
The diversity of the consumers, retail businesses and extent (if any) of passing-on of overcharges to consumers were not necessarily a bar to certification. Rather, the test was whether the class was more suitable for collective proceedings than individual actions, noting the risk that individual claims would be uneconomic.
By Jemma Slingo2020-12-11T15:42:00+00:00
The Supreme Court’s ruling against Mastercard will make it easier for group damages claims to proceed to trial, commentators have said. However, the card issuer’s solicitors have stressed the ‘very unusual circumstances’ of the judgment, in which justices were divided on key issues.
In a widely awaited judgment, the Supreme Court today
dismissed Mastercard’s appeal, finding that a 2017 Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) judgment was undermined by errors of law. The case has now been remitted to the tribunal for reconsideration.
In 2017 the CAT refused to certify the case, which is brought by former financial services ombudsman Walter Merricks CBE on behalf of 46 million credit and debit card holders. It is the first major opt-out action brought under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and is believed to be the largest damages claim ever brought in the UK, at an estimated £14bn.