Sunday, May 03, 2009

WHAT IS UNJUST ENRICHMENT?

According to Peter Birks in Unjust Enrichment,
"Every problem in unjust enrichment can be unlocked by asking these five questions:
1. was the defendant enriched?
2. was it at the expense of the claimant?
3. was it unjust?
4. what kind of right did the claimant acquire?
5. does the defendant have a defence?"

In the case of a member of the public taking out a loan the answers to Q1, Q2 and Q3 are yes.

Q1, the lender may have just £10 but lend out £50. Is the lender enriched by £40? Of course.

Q2, the loan may have been repaid by the borrower working very hard to earn the money, spending time working to repay the loan when he or she could have been working on something else to enrich themselves not the lender.

Q3, what does "unjust" mean in this context? Unjust could mean unlawful. This is where the FSMA 2000 and UTCCR 1999 come into effect.

Q4 is tricky. There is a related branch of law, that of restitution. It could be argued that the claimant has a right to claim back all the money he repaid over the amount of money the lender had when the loan was issued. For example, if the bank had only £10 but loaned out £50 and the loan was repaid in full with interest then the claimant had a claim to £40 plus the interest repaid that was due to the £40. But because at any one time banks loan out the same piece of money in several different loans then this argument becomes trickier when several claimants are involved.

Q5. Q5. Q5.

Does the defendant have defence?

One defence could be that a bank is allowed to create money out of nothing. Yes, that is true, but the FSMA 2000 states that the FSA should tell us all about the financial system. The FSA has been shown to have been totally incompetent during the current financial crisis when it should have been protecting and educating us on how the financial system works. The public are not aware of how the system works, thus making them easy targets of the banks. They are also unaware that the whole system is financing a warmongering movement for world government. Why should the public be protected from this movement? Because the instigators want a vastly reduced population and those allowed to live will be microchipped.

And then there is always the Bilderberg link to banking. A mortgage may have been issued during the last decade which became part of the derivatives scam, at the heart of which are J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, all represented at Bilderberg most years. The property boom was driven by several home improvement and sale programmes on TV, and low interest credit. If a mortgage helped this scam in some way, a scam that is contrary to The Fraud Act 2006 Section 4 due to its recklessness (a point of view the Treasury Committee is reaching), then is that mortgage valid?

This is all leads to the question; what legal advice did the banks take before they embarked on the derivatives scam, from whom and why?

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