Financial Services in UK Law

The FSMA is a portmanteau statute dealing with all kinds of investment activity, not just activities in traditional investments such as securities. Finally, the FSA is empowered to seek injunctions to restrain anticipated breaches of the basic prohibition in section 19, and also orders for the disgorging of profits by persons who have contravened FSMA and the payment by them of compensation to persons who have been adversely affected by their contraventions (sections 380 and 382 of FSMA).

First, section 235 is drafted in an open-textured way in that it is drafted at a high level of generality and it uses words, such as "arrangements" and "property of any description", which have a wide meaning. Thirdly, since contravention of the general prohibition in section 19 may result in the commission of criminal offences, section 235 must not be interpreted so as to include matters which are not fairly within it.

It has long been accepted that this is not a literalist exercise focused solely on a parsing of the wording of the particular clause but that the court must consider the contract as a whole and, depending on the nature, formality and quality of drafting of the contract, give more or less weight to elements of the wider context in reaching its view as to that objective meaning.

Textualism and contextualism are not conflicting paradigms in a battle for exclusive occupation of the field of contractual interpretation. Rather, the lawyer and the judge, when interpreting any contract, can use them as tools to ascertain the objective meaning of the language which the parties have chosen to express their agreement. The extent to which each tool will assist the court in its task will vary according to the circumstances of the particular agreement or agreements.

The legislative purpose evident from the detailed statutory scheme was that those aggrieved by the decisions and actions of the Authority should have recourse to the special procedures and to the specialist Tribunal rather than to the general jurisdiction of the Administrative Court.

(1) Interpretation is the ascertainment of the meaning which the document would convey to a reasonable person having all the background knowledge which would reasonably have been available to the parties in the situation in which they were at the time of the contract.

In conformity with the 1981 Convention and the Directive, the purpose of section 7, in entitling an individual to have access to information in the form of his "personal data" is to enable him to check whether the data controller's processing of it unlawfully infringes his privacy and, if so, to take such steps as the Act provides, for example in sections 10 to 14, to protect it.