Candy and Holyoake square off in legal tussle weeks ahead of major lawsuit

Property developers Christian Candy  and Mark Holyoake have gone head to head in a legal skirmish over disclosure just weeks before the former friends are due to square off in multi-million-pound High Court law suit. The pair are involved in a protracted legal wrangle over a property at Grosvenor Gardens, SW1, which is scheduled for a seven-week trial starting in February. On Tuesday, High Court judge Mr Justice Warby ruled on a dispute over information requests relating to the litigation. The case centres around “subject access requests”, which are written requests governed by the Data Protection Act 1998 made by an individual to gain access to personal data on that individual held by others. In this case, representatives of Holyoake had made a number of requests to Candy demanding he hand over information he held on Holyoake. After succeeding in narrowing the term of the request, the Candy side disclosed some information. At a hearing in December, lawyers for Holyoake argued that Candy’s representatives might not have “carried out adequate searches in response to the narrowed SARS”. However, Mr Justice Warby disagreed. “I find that the defendants’ searches were reasonable and proportionate,” he said in his ruling. Mark Alan Holyoake v Nicholas Anthony Christian Candy and CPC Group Limited QBD (Warby J) 24 Jan 2017