Does Your Lease Allow Group Company Assignments?

The Court of Appeal has recently attempted to clarify the interpretation of covenants dealing with intra-group assignments of leases.  Inevitably any interpretation is to some extent dependant on the particular wording of the covenant in the particular lease in question but the case of Tindall Cobham 1 Limited & Others v Adda Hotels & Others provides useful guidance to the way in which a Court would seek to interpret similar clauses.

The Tindall case addressed a not uncommon scenario feared by landlords following the Good Harvest line of cases¹  (which held that a guarantee given by an outgoing tenant's guarantor of an assignee's liability under a lease was void by virtue of the Landlord and Tenant (Covenants) Act 1995.  There are a relatively significant number of leases in existence where the tenant has negotiated a special concession to the usual requirement for landlord's consent to assign, such that any assignment to a group company does not need landlord's