The Supreme Court has ordered Honeywell Control Systems Limited to pay Eugene McCool’s costs of his successful appeal, but refused his request to change costs orders made in the High Court and Court of Appeal.
In a costs ruling delivered on 22 April 2024, the Court said McCool succeeded on the narrow ground on which permission to appeal had been granted. The respondent accepted that he was entitled to the appeal costs, which are to be adjudicated if the parties cannot agree them.
The costs ruling followed substantive appeal judgments delivered on 27 February 2024. In those judgments, the Court, with Charleton J. dissenting, held that an assignee of a company’s interest in litigation may in principle be permitted to continue the action after being substituted as plaintiff for the company.
McCool also asked the Court to set aside the costs orders he had faced in the lower courts and make no order as to costs there. He argued that the central issue had been resolved in his favour on appeal and referred to an earlier Supreme Court costs ruling on how to approach costs in lower courts when an appeal succeeds. He also pointed to his status as a litigant in person in the lower courts.
Honeywell opposed that request. It argued that McCool’s two substitution applications had been dismissed and that the purported assignments supporting them had been found invalid. It also relied on other grounds for the lower courts’ decisions, including issue estoppel or res judicata in the second application, and said findings about McCool’s conduct had not been considered in the Supreme Court appeal.
The Supreme Court declined to vary the lower court costs orders. It said the substitution applications had been dismissed for several reasons beyond whether the assignments were devices to circumvent the rule in Battle. The lower courts’ findings that the two purported assignments were invalid on separate grounds remained undisturbed. The Court therefore refused McCool’s application to change those costs orders.