The principle of unjust enrichment has its roots within the law of equity and draws its purpose from the need to restore a party
who delivered a benefit to a physical person or an entity, to its original position where the law would fail to do so. The following are cases
where the principle of unjust enrichment prevented a party from receiving a benefit at the expense of another.
Boone v Eyre
In that case the parties had contracted for the conveyance of a plantation for 500 pounds and an unnuity of 160 pounds. The claimant did not receive
the full amount of the annuinty and sued the defendant. The defendant refused to perfrom because the claimant had failed to perform his part of the contract
by not owning the slaves as it was a condition precedent that he owned the slaves. The Court decided that if he got to keep the arrears on the annuity then
that money was a lot more than what he would have claimed for the value of the illegal slaves and therefore he would get to be unnjustly enriched. The court decided
that because consideration went into part of the contract he should sue instead for the damages he sustained.
In Menalaou v Bank of Cyprus Ltd [2013] EWCA Civ 1960
In that case the defendants who where indebted to the bank made an agreement with them to release their charges on their house in order to sell it and use
the proceeds of the sale to buy another smaller house as their family home and a deposit for their newlywed daughter’s new home. The purchaseer was found for 1.9 million pounds
but that amount was not enough to settle the bank’s 2.2 million debt towards it. So the bank agreed with them to release their charges on their family home provided that it was going to
that they where going to be granted a new charge on the new new family home and 750.000 pounds off the proceeds of sale where going to be paid against their remaining
debt towards the bank. The house was going to be under their daughters Melissa’s name and she was going to sign it. Once it received the money the bank released its charges
on their house as agreed and they signed the When the couple later on run into financial difficulties the bank sought to sell the house under
their daughter’s name but the latter objected to it claiming it had no rights over it as she ever had signed the charge herself. The first level Court ruled that the daughter had been unjustly enrichment but since the enrichment was not at the bank’s expense because it did not release its charges on the mortgaged property until after the newly bought family home was transferred under Melissa’s name and therefore there was no causation between the bank’s suffering a detriment and the transfer of the benefit to the youngest daughter.
