Case ID: ohio-ch_1/html/0206-01.html
Source: Caselaw Access Project
Author: {"author": "By the Court.", "license": "Public Domain", "url": "https://static.case.law/"}
Date Created: 2024-08-24T03:29:51.129683

FOWLER v. J. H. PIATT’S ADMINISTRATOR.
    Settled account-opening a settlement for fraud or mistake — partnership—extra allowance after the assignment belongs to the assignee.
    Chancery will not open up’ a settlement of accounts for alleged fraud or mistake without the fraud or particular mistake is shown.
    When copartners settle a partnership claim upon a third person, and one assigns to the other, and the assignee afterwards obtain from the'debtor a greater sum than the assignor supposed he would get allowed, that makes no case of .either fraud or mistake to open up the settlement, and decree to the assignor a portion of the sum so received.
    Chancery. The case is fully stated in the opinion.
   By the Court.

The object of this bill is to let in the complainant to open up a settlement made between him and the defendant’s intestate, as to supplies furnished the army of the United States, upon a contract in which the parties were copartners and jointly interested. The settlement was of a long account of large expenditures upon the frontiers during'the late war, and consisted of numerous items. The right to open this settlement and re-adjust the balance between the parties to it, depends upon the ability of the complainant, to show mistake or fraud on the part of Piatt in bringing it about. Both fraud and mistake are charged in the bill, but each is fully denied in the answer. The proof taken in the cause, at most, only excites a slight suspicion that Piatt did not disclose to the complainant at the settlement, the expectations he had of obtaining from the treasury of the state an extra allowance on the contract. When the settlement was made, the complainant assigned to Piatt all his interest in the account, including of course, the claim upon the treasury. After the settlement, Piatt did obtain from the government an allowance of a considerable additional sum on the contract, which sum, as the assignee of the contract, he applied to his own use. The real object of this bill is to be let in to participate in that allowance. All the facts upon which Piatt’s expectations of extra allowance rested, were as well known to the complainant as to him, at the time of the settlement and assignment. Both parties before that time had been urging the allowance. No distinct act of Piatt’s is proven which establishes a fraud, either by suppressing truth, or by asserting falsehood, and the transaction viewed as a whole, falls short of establishing a fraud.

As to the mistake. No fact is proven, going to show that these parties settled by items, discussing them separately, or that any particular item or sum was not included, which ought to have been. The weight of the evidence, on the contrary, shows that the settlement was of the whole items in a lump. We admit that in such settlement it is difficult to show a mistake, but we are not allowed in cases of difficulty to dispense with all proof. Indeed the distinct claim seems to us, not that any mistake has found its way into the settlement, but that since the settlement the assignee of the claim, has induced the government to allow an extra compensation for rations supplied under the contract, the claim for which was undetermined when the assignment was made, though then pending and known to both.

The bill is dismissed.