ABSTRACT
A large Japanese contractor has said that he has “completed work on a 50 storey office block at a cost of £29 m without any contract”. His reference was to lack of a formal contract; there must, of course, have been a verbal contract in which the parties agreed that the work would be carried out for a particular price or based upon a particular method of pricing and there must have been drawings and a specification describing the work to be done. There may even have been a pricing document, or access to the contractor’s estimate, for the purpose of pricing variations.
