As Lord Sumption said in Hayes v Willoughby [2013] UKSC 17, harassment is a persistent and deliberate course of unreasonable and oppressive conduct, targeted at another person, which is calculated to and does cause that person alarm, fear or distress.
The High Court granted permanent injunctive relief under section 3A of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 in Ghenavat and others v Lyons [2023] EWHC 2428 (KB), a case concerning former friends who set up a property management, development and investment business.
The business was set up in 2004, with the first claimant and the defendant each owning 50% of the shares in the company. The second defendant joined as an employee in 2012 and purchased 20% of the shares in the company in 2019, with the first claimant and defendant each retaining 40%. The proceedings arose from the acrimonious breakdown in the relationship between the first claimant and the defendant.
The claimants alleged a course of conduct between March 2021 and September 2022 which amounted to harassment. There were more than 400 specific events complained of, nearly all communications from the defendant to the claimants or a wide range of third parties including family members, friends, clients, banks, professional advisers and the media. The communications used aggressive and exaggerated language, and many involved allegations of financial impropriety by the claimants, which the court was not in a position to determine.
The defendant accepted setting up various email accounts and domains and sending most of the communications complained of, but denied that they were sufficiently grave, oppressive or unacceptable to constitute harassment. Even if his conduct amounted to harassment, he argued that his behaviour was reasonable given the brutal way the claimants had pushed him out of the business, transferred the company’s business to their own companies and failed to account him as shareholder for money owed. Such allegations would be determined by the court in separate unfair prejudice proceedings brought by the defendant.
The court was satisfied that the defendant had pursued a course of conduct in respect of all the claimants which amounted to a prolonged attack lasting for more than a year. It was wide-ranging, covering not only their professional lives and abilities but also their personal lives, relationships, personal characteristics, background and cultural identity. The course of conduct was not reasonable, and the defendant knew of the harassing effect that his conduct would have and actually intended it. The case was crying out for mediation to resolve the outstanding business dispute and enable the parties to go their separate ways.
Louise Clark is a property law consultant and mediator
