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Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 07:40 From: Neil Foster Subject: Conversion of lottery ticket
Dear Colleagues On a lighter note, consider the legal issues raised by the following report in last week's paper. If an employee steals a winning lottery ticket and leaves the country, who should pay? Actually this is not unrelated to the discussion in OBG etc about conversion of intangibles. I suspect that this would amount to conversion of the value of the ticket (some £220,000) on the basis of the established exceptions to the normal rules of conversion that where a document "constitutes or evidences title to a debt" then an action in conversion may be taken for the value of the debt evidenced by the document (see Lord Hoffmann at [102] ff). The newspaper report is ambiguous but suggests that the customers may have had their money paid by NSW Lotteries (conceding perhaps some negligence in paying out to the fraudulent employee); but there seems to some indication that the Lotteries company is still suing the newsagents (as joint tortfeasors, being vicariously liable for the conversion committed by the employee? I think (and the High Court in Lepore thought) Morris v C W Martin [1966] 1 QB 716 implies that there can be vicarious liability for conversion; although as John Murphy pointed out in his paper on non-delegable duties from Emerging Issues, there is an alternative analysis of the case as one of NDD of a bailee, and one could not really call the newsagent a "bailee" of the lottery ticket. Or maybe one could ...
Regards Neil Foster
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