PT Panosonic Gobel Indonesia v Stratech Systems Ltd

Philip Pillai JC:

[1] This was an appeal brought by the defendant from the assistant registrar’s (“AR”) decision on 11 January 2010 in which the AR awarded the plaintiff, PT Panasonic Gobel Indonesia, the sum of S$1,830,000 as damages.

[2] The principal ground of appeal was that the plaintiff had failed to prove the loss and damage it has suffered given the nature of the claim and the evidence it adduced. The defendant, Stratech Systems Limited, submitted that in the circumstances, the plaintiff should only have been awarded nominal damages.

[3] In support of this, the defendant, Stratech Systems Limited, first submitted that the plaintiff’s claim for a refund of the entire payments made by them to the defendant was in fact a claim for restitution. The defendant submitted that a claim for restitution could only be made if the plaintiff could show that there was a total failure of consideration.

[5] Three measures of damages are set out by Andrew Phang in Cheshire, Fifoot and Furmston’s Law of Contract - Second Singapore and Malaysian Edition (Butterworths Asia, 1998) (“Cheshire, Fifoot and Furmston – Second Singapore and Malaysian Edition”) at pp 988 – 989:

[6] In principle, it seemed that the plaintiff had a free choice whether to quantify his loss on an expectation or a reliance basis. The plaintiff was claiming reliance loss in that the payment of the contract sum was wasted. CCC Films (London) Ltd v Impact Quadrant Films Ltd [1985] QB 16 is authority for the proposition that a claim can be made for such loss. In that case, the plaintiffs were awarded the contractual price they had paid to the defendants for a licence to exploit three movies. It was found that the defendants had breached subsidiary contracts to deliver the tapes of those movies, and thus a foreseeable result of the breach was that the expenditure incurred by the plaintiffs in acquiring the licence would be wasted. In the present case, the plaintiff was similarly not claiming for restitution, but was claiming for reliance loss in the form of the wasted expenditure it sustained when it paid the contract sum.

[7] The AR observed that:

I agreed with the above observations and noted that they were in accord with the decision of Judith Prakash J and the law summarised above.

[8] Secondly, the defendant submitted that the plaintiff has derived a benefit from the services it gave and accordingly a claim for total refund of the payments could not be allowed. However, the burden was on the defendant to establish benefit. The AR found that the defendant had not:

As the defendant had not established the benefit of the service, this submission lacked merit.