As there are a lot of clever people on here, I wondered if there were any lawyers?
We bought a vehicle at an auction site. Paid a decent amount of money, collected it, bought parts, repaired it ect. We have recently as vertised it for sale and someone has come forward and claimed the vehicle was stolen from them over a year ago. We approached the auction house to gain more information on who submitted the vehicle into the auction and it was direct from the police. In most cases, buying a stolen vehicle means it would revert back to the original owner as the thief/non owner would not have had the right to sell the vehicle. However, in this case, we purchased the vehicle from the police. I would have thought the police must have made reasonable checks as to the owner so I don’t think the owner reported the theft to the police or the central vehicle database at the time of the theft. Would this be a case of ‘Estoppel by negligence’ where the original owner had not taken sufficient care to ensure his belongings were not sold on and therefore we keep the vehicle? The item was not insured so this is between us/police/original owner. Thanks for any value you can add as we are obviously loathe to lose thousands of pounds.
We bought a vehicle at an auction site. Paid a decent amount of money, collected it, bought parts, repaired it ect. We have recently as vertised it for sale and someone has come forward and claimed the vehicle was stolen from them over a year ago. We approached the auction house to gain more information on who submitted the vehicle into the auction and it was direct from the police. In most cases, buying a stolen vehicle means it would revert back to the original owner as the thief/non owner would not have had the right to sell the vehicle. However, in this case, we purchased the vehicle from the police. I would have thought the police must have made reasonable checks as to the owner so I don’t think the owner reported the theft to the police or the central vehicle database at the time of the theft. Would this be a case of ‘Estoppel by negligence’ where the original owner had not taken sufficient care to ensure his belongings were not sold on and therefore we keep the vehicle? The item was not insured so this is between us/police/original owner. Thanks for any value you can add as we are obviously loathe to lose thousands of pounds.