21 December 2000
An Australian mortgage company claims it has been bullied into giving up a legitimate business name and Internet address by Abbey National, despite the fact the British bank has no presence in Australia.
AbbeyNational Home Loans, a mortgage originator which claims to do over $40 million a month in home loans, was set up by Mr Simon Finnigan in 1996, originally as a franchisee of Access Home Loans.
But in 1998 the franchisor merged with First National Real Estate to become Access First National and Mr Finnigan went independent. He claims he kept the National and innocently picked ``Abbey" to be ahead of his competitor in the phone book.
Registering the trading names AbbeyNational Australia, AbbeyNational WA, Abbey National Brisbane and Abbey National Australasia, was no problem because the UK entity had no retail presence in Australia.
Mr Finnigan believes that if it were not for the Internet domain name he would have been able to continue trading without a problem.
``Abbey initially contacted me wanting to buy the domain name for $50,000," he said.
``I replied that $50,000 wasn't enough to cover the costs of changing the name and stationery."
Mr Finnigan said he had also spent $500,000 on advertising.
``I expected them to come back and negotiate but the next thing I got was notification from the Federal Court," he said.
Mr Finnigan said he fully intended to defend the case and had spent $100,000 doing so after advice from law firm Gadens that he could win.
Mr Finnigan changed his mind after being told that the UK Abbey National would probably appeal any decision to the High Court and the cost could reach $300,000.
The company name will now change to Financial Partners early next year.
Mr Andrew Wiseman, a partner at Allen, Allen & Hemsley, which acted for the UK bank, confirmed it was the domain name that brought the issue to the bank's attention.
Abbey National has an agency to monitor domain names worldwide.
The bank's case was built on the fact there is sufficient movement of magazines, newspapers and people between the UK and Australia an estimated 10 to 15 million people in the past 20 years to create a large audience of people aware of the reputation of the UK bank and likely to assume a relationship between the entities.
The law firm acknowledged it was not a cybersquatting case as there was no attempt to sell the name to the UK bank but maintained that the company deliberately set out to benefit from the name.
``The message is that if you're going to use the good name of an international company, just adding .com.au won't get you off the hook," said Mr Wiseman.
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