Mr. Mohammad-Raza Ghadiri of RG Solicitors represented and successfully defended their client in this intense commercial litigation case.
How should a court resolve ireconcilable differences between the parties’ contentions about their business arrangements, when the documentary evidence is fragmentary at best and the meetings now being recalled in oral evidence took place more than 20 years ago?
In Gheewalla v Rasul [2022] EWHC 3180 (Ch), in the Chancery Division of the High Court (England & Wales) [below], Nicholas Thompsell as a Deputy High Court Judge helpfully lays out at [41]ff the approach recommended by existing case law, which starts by recognising the unreliability of oral testimony.
Assessing the competing arguments, he notes that for an agreement giving the claimant a one-third profit share in a hotel group to have left no documentary evidence at all is inherently improbable. That contract claim having failed, the tests for an unjust enrichment claim are met, but for more modest services the claimant had provided (not yet quantified).
