Fascinating; many thanks to Andrew for this. I suppose that if the court is going to take the restitutionary aspects seriously, they will have to decide whether to view it as a case about restitution for wrongs, or restitution for free acceptance. There seem to be elements of both in Judge LJ's opinion, and perhaps they can be alternatives on these freak facts.

The difficulty with the claim for restitution for wrongs start (and, after Blake, probably finish) with identifying the wrong. It looks as if the Dutch telecom company charged its customers pretty much what it liked for calls. Their problem is that they charged all callers to the UK the same rate, and only slowly realised that this was a bad idea, as they would themselves be charged a much higher rate if it was a call to a premium rate UK number. To see whether a wrong was committed against them, the full hearing is going have to look much more closely at the contractual position between the Dutch firm and its customers. As with Blake itself, there's a tendency to feel that the defendants *must* have done something wrong, though in that respect it's clear that the claimants will have a much harder run for their money than the AG had in Blake. (Which is odd, because it's very far from obvious that Blake's book revealed official secrets or harmed national security.)

As to the free acceptance route, the difficulty I have is with seeing how the Dutch company can be said to have conferred a benefit on the premium service providers. That's the exact contrary of the way it was seen contractually: when a call is put through to the premium service providers, they invoice the company along whose lines they received it, who then invoice the company from whom *they* received it, and so on backwards (not forwards). So it seems odd to reverse it and to say that the Dutch telecom firm are conferring a benefit on the premium service provider, when the parties themselves saw it the other way around.

Steve Hedley

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