ABSTRACT
May LJ: Mr Caplan [counsel for the appellant] has submitted that section 15 is not concerned with questions of lawful title to any relevant property but, as the section itself specifically provides, with the ownership, possession or control of such property. He submits that when one asks the question whether at any material time – that is to say at any time before the bank in Kuwait was asked to remit to England – the appellant had control of what seemed to be his credit balance, the answer must be ‘yes, he did’ – at least until the bank discovered the fraud. Until they were so put on inquiry it would not have been possible for them to have said that this appellant had no such credit balance. Mr Caplan went on to argue that the proof of the pudding was in the eating because the bank in Kuwait in fact acted upon the letters which the appellant wrote asking for the transfers of his credit
balances; it is thus difficult to say, Mr Caplan contends, that the appellant did not have control of a credit balance when the bank acted upon the basis that he did. In this connection he referred us to the case of Kohn (1979) 69 Cr App R 395 ... He submits that when the appellant acted as he did in programming the computer in Kuwait with the result that in addition to it appearing to give him credit on his savings accounts it also diminished the amounts standing to the credit of the other five substantial but dormant accounts, there was at the very least the risk of the diminution in the credit balances on those accounts. Consequently he submitted that we ought to hold that for the purposes of the relevant provisions of the Theft Act the obtaining of the property, the chose in action, occurred in Kuwait at the time that the computer went into action as the appellant’s plane was in the air over the Mediterranean.
