SANTOH (HK) LTD. v. WONG WAI CHUNG (ALIAS DAVID WONG)

HCA5217/2001

IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE

HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION

COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE

CIVIL ACTION NO. HCA5217 OF 2001

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JUDGMENT

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1. This is an application under Order 14 of the Rules of the High Court. The plaintiff , a limited company, used to employ the defendant in a managerial position and they parted company in acrimonious circumstances with the defendant feeling especially aggrieved about it.

2. Now the plaintiff seeks an injunction restraining the defendant (in the usual way), by himself, his servants or agents, from entering the plaintiff's office premises or contacting it or its associated company or staff, or agents, by whatever means, save by correspondence to its solicitors, Amelia Cheung & Company, in connection with three related matters; an action in the District Court in which the defendant in this action is plaintiff and in two Small Claims Tribunal applications which are particularised on the face of the summons. There is also a claim for damages which I will come to in a moment.

3. I found this matter disturbing in the extreme. What is said against the defendant is that he has made a wretched nuisance of himself ever since he and the plaintiff parted company, he has bombarded them with fax transmissions ventilating his grievances; he has visited them on numerous occasions and the police have become involved.

4. Having issued the writ, the plaintiff has come to court and the matter has had to be considered in the past by Kwan J, Suffiad J, Yeung J - I think on more than one occasion - and various orders have been made by those judges in the form of injunctions, but I am afraid with very little positive response from the defendant.

5. The application for summary judgment today is supported by a very detailed affirmation of Mr Raymond Leung, affirmed on 5 July this year, which exhibits voluminous documents. The most disturbing statistic is that the defendant, from 31 August last year until 7 December last year, has felt able to send 16,253 pages of fax messages. Doing the calculation, perhaps really out of interest, I am told that to transmit that number of pages will have taken 135 hours and 30 minutes; if one were to convert that into a continuous transmission - if there be a fax machine that can do that without rest, as it were - that would take 5.6 days of continuous transmission. In my judgment, this must amount to obsessive behaviour on the part of the defendant. No organisation should have to put up with this sort of bombardment.

6. Part of the plaintiff's claim now is, reasonably, in my judgment, a claim for damages being the cost of their staff having to be diverted to deal with all of these transmissions in the sense of collating them, having to read them, and this is all particularised very carefully and very fairly, I think, in Mr Leung's affirmation. The precise amount claimed as at 31 March of this year is $41,059.83 and the charge out rate appears to me to have been done at a very conservative rate as well.

7. First of all, on the injunction, I take the view this behaviour is intolerable and that the defendant, who I have heard address me this morning, can simply have no defence to this - this is nuisance at a high level - and so I will make an order in terms of paragraph 1 and of the summons.

8. I assess damages flowing from the nuisance in the amount claimed, just over $41,000, as I have already indicated in the course of the judgment.

9. There is a claim for interest and I will hear Mr Chan on that, and I will also deal with the question of costs. So those are the orders that I propose to make.

(Discussion re interest and costs)

10. So there will be interest at 2 per cent from the date of the writ until today and thereafter at the judgment rate until payment together with, inevitably, an order for costs to include, I suppose, the costs reserved.

(Further discussion re costs)

11. There will be an order for costs together with an order to include costs reserved.