Man sues bookies for 2 million

Hope he gets nothing myself. He could have stopped this at the beginning and now he wants £2 million back? He can crawl out of this hole himself least now he has no money to gamble with? idiot
 
R124/LA420 said:
I quite agree, but, what pubs are legally not allowed to do and what they do when a ****ed punter is wanting another pint is quite another matter.
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And that punter could take them to court for damages if they did (ignoring the criminal aspect of breaking the law as well). Though what damages could he actually claim in that case?

It becomes a different matter if he then gets injured or otherwise hurt as a result of being drunk, or incurs substantial finiancial loses such as £2million in the case of a gambling addict.
 
vonhelmet said:
He has the right to claim the money back because they either failed in their duty of care or they breached their contract with him.
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Well, it is almost never going to be a breach of contract, because there wouldn't have been consideration on the claimant's side.

If the claimant had given William Hill £1 for example, to "seal the deal" when asking to not be allowed to bet, it would have been a binding contract and this would have been a breach situation. But if it was simply a matter of the claimant phoning up William Hill and asking himself to be banned, then the promise to ban the claimant was a gratuitous promise by William Hill and they were not bound to honour the promise.

Moreover, even if it was a breach of contract, most of the damages would not be awarded, as it was a clear failure of the duty of the injured party to "not unreasonably incur additional damages" and also a failure to "mitigate his own loss", i.e. to stop betting and stop losing money (radical, I know!)

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In terms of duty of care, to breach the duty of care you first have to owe it. There is no "automatic" duty of care owed by a shop to its customers. For this particular type of loss, if there is no existing duty situation then you have to show that a novel duty situation exists, by satisfying the 3-prong test in Caparo v Dickman.

The claimant may have been successful in proving 1. the proximity of relationship and 2. the foreseeability of damages, but there is no way the claimant would have proven that it was 3. "fair, just and reasonable" to hold William Hill to owe a duty of care towards the claimant, because this would result in a new duty of care relationship and the courts clearly will not entertain the absurd new resulting situation. Yes, even they have common sense most of the time - quite often it's not their own logic failure that results in the crazy cases you hear about, but rather the fact that they are bound by existing law when making judgements and are not completely free to do what they like, as most people seem to think.

I would be interested to see the report, but it wouldn't surprise me if the claim tripped on this point.

Moreover, there are a number of other hurdles to the claim, including:

1. The fact that the claimant then went on to open other accounts could have been held to be an intervening act and thus break the chain of causation (novus actus). The fact that all the resulting damage arose out of the claimant's continued gambling means that the damage is not "naturally flowing" from the breach, as it relied on the claimant's intervention each and every time.

2. The fact that the claimant could have said to understood and accepted the risk by continuing to bet (volenti)

3. The fact that, at the end of the day, the vast majority of people understand that it was an absurd case to begin with.

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Stinky said:
update today. he failed!!
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Well, that was the High Court... Let's all hope this ****-take of the legal system doesn't continue on to the Court of Appeal!
 
If he's been betting £25,000 a time then he doesn't need the compensation.

Well, now he does.. :o
 
platypus said:
The duty of care issue aside, imagine what kind of floodgates this would have opened on the betting industry had he won.
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Well, that's partly why the courts would not have imposed the duty of care in this situation. They have a specific maneuvering room given to them by the 3rd prong of the Caparo test of the requirement that it must be "fair, just and reasonable" to impose a duty of care, which allows the courts to prevent establishment of duty of care specifically for policy reasons, i.e. the floodgates argument amongst others.
 
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