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Representative Claimants v MGN Ltd [2015] EWCA Civ 1291 (17 December 2015)
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These appeals are brought by MGN Limited ("MGN"), proprietor of the Daily Mirror, The Sunday People and The Sunday Mirror newspapers, against the orders dated 11 June 2015 of Mann J, awarding substantial sums ranging from £72,500 to £260,250 to the eight respondents to these appeals for misuse of private information derived from intercepting voicemail messages left on the respondents' telephones (referred to below as "hacking"). I have set out details of the awards in the schedule, together with particulars of the sums contended for at trial.
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In the present case, MGN has asked the court to reduce the awards without, as the respondents point out, taking the court to so much as a single award which they contend is excessive or explaining the element of it which is on their case excessive. I have, as it happens, read the articles alongside the judge's detailed rulings on them. It does not strike me reading them, in the light of the judge's rulings and his factual findings, that any of them involved an error of law. The test is not whether I would have made exactly that award - the assessment of general damages is not an exact science - but whether he was entitled to make the awards that he did. MGN cannot expect this Court to come to its rescue and find some way of finding the awards to be excessive when its staff have been responsible for disgraceful conduct with such distressing consequences, and when to boot it is quite unable itself to point to actual awards that it contends are wrong.
These appeals are brought by MGN Limited ("MGN"), proprietor of the Daily Mirror, The Sunday People and The Sunday Mirror newspapers, against the orders dated 11 June 2015 of Mann J, awarding substantial sums ranging from £72,500 to £260,250 to the eight respondents to these appeals for misuse of private information derived from intercepting voicemail messages left on the respondents' telephones (referred to below as "hacking"). I have set out details of the awards in the schedule, together with particulars of the sums contended for at trial.
.................
In the present case, MGN has asked the court to reduce the awards without, as the respondents point out, taking the court to so much as a single award which they contend is excessive or explaining the element of it which is on their case excessive. I have, as it happens, read the articles alongside the judge's detailed rulings on them. It does not strike me reading them, in the light of the judge's rulings and his factual findings, that any of them involved an error of law. The test is not whether I would have made exactly that award - the assessment of general damages is not an exact science - but whether he was entitled to make the awards that he did. MGN cannot expect this Court to come to its rescue and find some way of finding the awards to be excessive when its staff have been responsible for disgraceful conduct with such distressing consequences, and when to boot it is quite unable itself to point to actual awards that it contends are wrong.
