Motorist drops ‘exaggerated’ claim
A driver who received personal injuryin a road accident has dropped his claim for up to £900,000 after surveillance showed he ‘grossly exaggerated’ its impact.
The motorist was instead awarded a £13,000 accident claim settlement for neck and chest injuries sustained in a head-on collision with an off-duty solider.
The judge questioned the claim to still suffer from chest pains seven years after the accident, contrary to medical opinion, and raised issues about his posture.
These issues where highlighted when the claimant was seen jogging upstairs and loading tiling bricks. As a result the judge labelled his claim to be “uncreditworthy” due to his “bizarre and fabricated symptoms.”
On Wednesday, he told the High Court: “That the plaintiff was deliberately exaggerating these postures was amply illustrated by surveillance reports carried out on him without his knowledge by witnesses on behalf of the defendant.”
Surveillance footage
The claimant brought a case against the soldier and the Ministry of Defence due to a high-speed frontal collision at an undisclosed location.
However, a care claim in excess of £400,000 and a wage claim - past and future - amounting to a further £472,000, were not proceeded with.
This is mostly due to surveillance footage which exposed the motorist of fraud.
The judge stated: “A DVD of October 2007 revealed him showing no ill-effects whatsoever from the accident in 2003 when he was observed jogging upstairs, working with three colleagues in a house, unloading a large lengthy item with others, lifting and bending over... loading up material at the bottom of a ladder as well as loading tiling blocks approximately 3ft x 2ft in size into the bottom of a ladder for several minutes.
“Similarly, on November 14 2008, he was seen walking along the street holding a toddler child, opening the boot of a car with one arm and putting the child into a safety seat. He was driving without any pain, difficulty or disability.”
The judge however, did not deny that the man suffered from some injury and noted that he was satisfied that the early notes, records and hospitalisation did reveal the motorist sustained a neck injury more significant than typical whiplash.
“I consider that probabilities are that he did fully recover somewhere between 12-18 months from the date of the accident,” he stated.
“However, he was so untrustworthy in the course of his evidence and in his account to the medical experts that it is frankly impossible to make any sensible diagnosis of his psychiatric condition other than to say that I am satisfied that some measure of early depression likely exacerbated to some extent the physical injuries which he suffered in the initial weeks,” he concluded.Updated on 5/6/2010