In the case of charter reinsurance vs Fagan, Lord Hoffman related a fictional dialogue involving a husband and his wife about her new dress. The purpose was to illustrate the way in which words do not always have their "obvious" meaning. The words in question were part of a contract under which a reinsurer agreed to reimburse an insurance company for "the sum actually paid" by that company under a policy. Surely, argued the reinsurer, those words meant that it only had to stump up if the company had actually paid out under the policy, i.e. if the money had left its bank account.
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