ParkingEye court losses mount up. Prankster updates their news page.

ParkingEye's news page has not been updated in a while. Here is what The Prankster imagines it will look like when they finally get round to updating it.

ParkingEye loses cases

ParkingEye would like to clarify to its shareholders that its policy of paying expensive lawyers to win trophy cases against unrepresented and legally inexperienced motorists is no longer working. The phrase 'shooting fish in a barrel' no longer applies. Even in the cases we win, the judges are not awarding our legal costs, despite us writing repeatedly in our claim 'we strongly believe we will be awarded costs'. In future we will write this phrase in larger type and bold fonts so the judge gets the message. We are spending huge amounts of time and energy preparing cases, and come out hundreds of pounds worse off even if we win.

Here are some of the trophy cases we blew in recent weeks

ParkingEye v Sfoxjones 8 Nov 2013 We tried to stuff a motorist for a ten minute overstay, despite knowing there was a disabled passenger involved, despite not having clear signage in the disabled parking area, and despite not knowing the actual parking duration because our cameras do not know this. We cannot remember if we redacted the paragraphs giving the grace period for this car park when we submitted our documentation. We usually do, in case it blows our case. It did not matter either way. The judge rejected the case as being fundamentally flawed before the defence even got to present, because we made no attempt to justify the ANPR timings produced by our cameras.

3QT61897 ParkingEye v Ms B. We tried to stuff a motorist for breaking down in McDonalds. She never saw any of the signage because we hid it behind bushes and in trees. We showed the judge a contract dated after the parking event. We tricked a McDonald's manager into signing a witness statement saying the charge was valid by not telling him the motorist was broken down. The judge adjourned the case and the McDonalds manager ordered us to drop the charges when he found out we did not tell him the motorist was broken down. At least that meant we only had to fork out £300 to our LPC Law stooge for one hearing rather than two.

3QT52338 ParkingEye v Walkden 29/10/2013 Barrow in Furness
The contract sent to the defendant was dated Feb 2013 whilst the parking event  was October 2012. 

The witness statement from Paul Shrewbrook of the Range and the attached letter of authority was not dated. The judge ruled that ParkingEye did not have authority to manage the car park because they contravened section 7.1 of the BPA code of practice which clearly states that the parking company must have written authority before any management of a car park can commence.

3QT62646 ParkingEye v X 23/10/2013 Brentford County Court

District Judge Jenkins explained he was throwing the claim out because it was not brought in the name of the landowner. He said the landowner could bring the case in their own name if they wished.

ParkingEye drops cases

In our previous news item we stated that we always proceed to a hearing unless the motorist pays up beforehand. We would like to correct this statement because it was misleading and frightening large numbers of motorists into paying up when they did not need to. We have have actually dropped large numbers of cases.

We dropped a case against a motorist suffering a diabetic incident. Although our view is that even dying is not grounds for non-payment of a parking charge, McDonalds thought differently and ordered us to drop the charge.

We dropped several cases where hotels ordered us not to penalise their guests.

We dropped a case where were pursuing someone who was neither the registered keeper nor the driver. Although this meant we had no legal grounds for the charge, we pigheadedly pursued the case until the motorist threatened to charge us, when we backed down.

We dropped a case where our witness statement from Collier was found to be, um, dodgy. We have a large number of cases with other dodgy witness statements flying about, and so far have not decided what to do about these.

We dropped large numbers of other cases because the landowner instructed us to.

ParkingEye settles cases

We forgot to stress that we settle large numbers of cases with motorists. There is no need to pay us the £50 solicitor fee for a start, because we have never made any attempt to justify this. We will settle for under £100; if you're a good negotiator you can beat us down to under £30.

ParkingEye warns motorist not to follow forum advice

We would repeat our warning not to follow old forum advice. This is outdated, but due to the way forums work, old advice hangs about forever and can turn up in Google searches. Please make sure any advice is up to date. Current forum advice is to take us to POPLA and appeal on the grounds that the charge is not a genuine pre-estimate of loss and no cost breakdown has been provided. This has a 100% success rate against us at the moment and so we happily lend ourself to endorsing this advice. Losing at POPLA is our preferred method of throwing money away and is significantly more cost effective than winning at court.

ParkingEye cashes out to Capita for £57m

We can confirm we told Capita everything during due diligence so there is no need for everybody to keep informing Capita's CEO of any dodgy practices they find out about. Please stop doing this, at least until we have time to get the loot out of the country.

The Prankster looks forward eagerly to the update, and in the event ParkingEye are too busy at the moment, he waives copyright on this piece in case ParkingEye want to post it up on their site.

Happy Parking

The Parking Prankster

[Edit. The Prankster originally left out an 'm' in ParkingEye's valuation. He was thinking of their possible new value following the Judge's revelation that the explanation of ANPR technology was fatally flawed in ParkingEye v sfoxjones.]