Financial service regulators are increasingly willing to
involve themselves in the area of data protection. When they do so,
the attitude they take to imposing punishment ought to remind us of
a very old legal maxim. Collas Crill Partners Wayne Atkinson discusses
this below in the latest contribution to Compliance
Matters by experts in Guernsey's legal sector.
I have been thinking a lot recently about an old English legal
case called Rylands v Fletcher. To be brief, Rylands v
Fletcher was a decision by the House of Lords in England and
Wales which established a whole new area of English tort law - that
of non-contractual liability. In the middle of the 19th century Mr
Rylands paid some people, who turned out to be chancers, to build a
reservoir. Rylands' reservoir almost immediately burst and
flooded a neighbouring mine, run by Fletcher, causing significant
damage. Think of a particularly bad episode of Poldark and
you'll have the general picture of what might
