The Court refused leave to amend a contempt notice of motion and statement of charge where the original charge was fundamentally defective — it impermissibly aggregated alleged non-compliance with six separate court orders into a single charge to which the respondent could only enter one plea, rendering the charge ambiguous and denying the respondent a proper opportunity to answer. The proposed amendments, which abandoned five of six alleged breaches, were characterised as substantial rather than minor corrections, and granting leave at the hearing stage would have caused genuine prejudice by depriving the respondent of the opportunity to defeat the charge as originally framed, given forensic choices already made in reliance on the existing pleading. The Court also held that the absence of particulars was not itself fatal where the nature of the orders (requiring omissions) meant the charge gave sufficient notice of the case to be met, but this did not save the charge from its aggregation and ambiguity defects.
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