You may recall my post some months ago about the widening of restrictive covenants by the Court. The court added words into the covenant to give it a commercially sensible result. If not here is a reminder:
Well the case has been overturned on appeal. The Court of Appeal has held in Prophet v Huggett (take 2) that the Court cannot re-write covenants to enable them to make sense. The High Court had previously added words to give effect to the intention of the parties. The Court of Appeal said that this may be possible where a clause is ambiguous but in this case it is just badly drafted. Oops! Since Prophet had drafted the clause, they were stuck with it and no doubt they will have words with the author whether lawyer or internal.
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