The Supreme Court has overturned an order allowing the plaintiff in a libel action over a 1998 Sunday Times article to change its name from Sandy Lane Hotel Limited to Sandy Lane Hotel Co. Limited.
The proceedings were issued in June 1998 against Times Newspapers Limited, Zoe Brennan and Wendy Leith. The case concerned an article published on 1 March 1998 about the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados.
During discovery, a discrepancy emerged between the plaintiff named in the proceedings and the company shown on hotel accounts. The High Court in November 2005 allowed the name to be corrected under a rule permitting clerical errors or errors in parties’ names to be fixed.
The defendants appealed. They argued that this was not a misspelling or transcription mistake. Sandy Lane Hotel Limited and Sandy Lane Hotel Co. Limited were separate companies. The latter, a Barbados company, owned and operated the hotel, while the former was a St Lucia company and its parent.
Mr Justice Hardiman agreed. He said a clerical error is one arising in the mechanical process of writing or copying. Here, evidence from the plaintiff’s company secretary showed that the wrong company name had been used because those involved had not appreciated the significance of a 1997 change of name.
The judge said this amounted to a mistaken belief rather than a clerical error. More importantly, the proceedings had actually been brought in the name of a different company which existed at the same time as the intended plaintiff.
That meant the case required substitution of one legal entity for another rather than correction of a name.
The Supreme Court therefore allowed the appeal and refused the application under Order 63 Rule 1(15). It expressly left open whether a fresh substitution application could succeed, including any defence that the claim by the proposed plaintiff was now barred by the statute of limitations.