Government contracts have to be put out to tender and such procurement exercises are a source of fierce competition and, not infrequently, litigation. One such case concerned the chequered history of attempts by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to procure 6,000 product lines of hand tools essential for military needs. There had been at least two past attempts by...

Deceit has a way of catching up with you and that certainly happened in one High Court case in which the owner of a chain of luxury hotels and a dishonest bank employee paid in full for perpetrating an audacious multi-million-pound fraud. The businessman’s companies had, over a sustained period, received £17 million in unauthorised loans from a bank. The...

The Employment Rights (Increase of Limits) Order 2017, which details the annual inflation-linked changes in limits on the compensation amounts which can be awarded by employment tribunals, will apply where the appropriate date falls on or after 6 April 2017. The main changes are: The maximum amount of a week’s pay for the purpose of calculating a...

Whilst gambling may not be everybody’s cup of tea, casinos generate tourism, jobs and handsome profits and competition to develop them can be intense. In one case, a tendering exercise in which no less than seven bids were received to build a large casino in a single seaside city came under the High Court microscope. Following the exercise, the local authority...

Small businesses are like babies to those who own them but that is no excuse for resorting to deceit when faced by financial problems. Getting professional advice is always the best option and, in one case that proved the point, a successful jeans designer, whose products were popular with Hollywood stars, received a lengthy sentence of imprisonment after he...