Contract and Commercial Law Act 2017

Contracts legislation - Frustrated contracts - Other valuable benefits

64: Benefit may be treated as being obtained

You could also call this:

“Court can treat a benefit given to someone else as if it was given to you”

The court can consider a benefit given to someone else as if it was given to you, if you agreed to do something in return for that other person getting the benefit. This can happen even if the other person isn’t part of the agreement. The court will only do this if they think it’s fair based on everything that’s happened.

For example, imagine you make a deal where your friend gets a gift, but you have to do a job in return. The court might treat it as if you got the gift yourself, even though your friend actually received it.

The court can do this whether or not your friend is officially part of the agreement. They will look at all the details to decide if it’s the right thing to do.

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View the original legislation for this page at https://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1986/0120/latest/link.aspx?id=DLM6844147.


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Part 2 Contracts legislation
Frustrated contracts: Other valuable benefits

64Benefit may be treated as being obtained

  1. For the purposes of section 63, the court may, if in all the circumstances the court considers it just to do so, treat a benefit conferred on a person (C) as a benefit obtained by a person (A) if A has assumed obligations under the contract in consideration of the benefit being conferred on C by any other party to the contract.

  2. Subsection (1) applies whether or not C is a party to the contract.

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