Edward Marrocco

This is a costs endorsement following the dismissal of an application to enforce an oral agreement and the granting of an application for partition and sale of property.

The successful parties (Bruno Rosso, Nancy Rosso, and Salvatore Rosso) sought costs awards.

The court awarded costs on a substantial indemnity scale to Bruno and Nancy, and on a partial indemnity scale to Salvatore.

The court considered factors including the complete success of the parties, the complexity of the issues, the proportionality of costs to the property value, the reasonableness of counsel fees and time spent, and the conduct of the unsuccessful party during litigation.

The Penfound Parties moved to lift a permanent stay of their claims and counterclaims, which had been imposed after they improperly accessed the Sprott Parties' privileged documents.

They sought the appointment of a litigation receiver and manager, arguing this constituted a material change in circumstances that would detoxify the litigation.

The court dismissed the motion, finding that the proposed remedy was not a new circumstance but an argument that could have been raised during the original stay motion.

The court held that issue estoppel precluded relitigating the appropriate remedy, and regardless, a receiver could not effectively cure the prejudice caused by the moving parties' knowledge of privileged information.

The case involved a dispute between brothers Domenic, Salvatore, and Bruno Rosso, and their wives, concerning minutes of settlement.

Bruno moved to enforce the minutes, alleging Domenic breached them.

Domenic cross-moved to set aside the minutes, claiming duress, fraudulent misrepresentation, or improvidence, and also arguing they were null and void under a specific contractual clause.

The court found that Domenic and Carmelina (Domenic's wife and a "Settling Party") validly exercised their contractual right under the minutes of settlement to declare them null and void due to an uncured default.

The court dismissed Bruno's motion to enforce and granted Domenic's cross-motion to set aside the minutes of settlement on this contractual basis, rejecting Domenic's other claims of duress, misrepresentation, and improvidence due to lack of credible evidence.

The moving parties (Sprott Parties) sought to stay the responding parties' (Penfound Parties) claims as an abuse of process after discovering the responding parties had unauthorized access to and reviewed privileged emails and documents belonging to the moving parties.

The court found that the responding parties obtained access to confidential and privileged information and failed to rebut the presumption of prejudice.

Concluding that allowing the action to proceed would be manifestly unfair and bring the administration of justice into disrepute, the court permanently stayed the responding parties' claims.