Police pay £4m to court row language service

YORKSHIRE’S POLICE forces agreed lucrative multi-millionpound contracts with a translation service that has since been ordered to pay damages to a firm it diverted profits from.

Language Empire Limited was ordered in September to pay £142,044 to Leeds-based claimant the Big Word, which counts various Government departments among its global clientele.

Following an Intellectual Property Enterprise Court trial, a judge ruled that the defendant, based in Rochdale, made “significant sales” by converting business enquiries from two of its websites which looked like they were connected with the Big Word.

In a published court judgment, Judge Melissa Clarke assessed that this could have occurred from June 1, 2014 to March 31, 2017 – the day before North, West, South and Humberside Police began contracts with the firm for translation, interpretation and transcription services on April 1.

The Big Word had made its claim on March 10, 2017 alleging the defendants had, by setting up the websites, deliberately infringed trademarks and passed off the sites as connected to its own “as part of a deliberate search optimisation scheme set up by them to divert potential customers,” the judgment reads.

After these websites were taken down, the Big Word’s actual sites went from receiving 6,500 hits per month to 10,000, according to Mark Daly, whom Judge Clarke described as a “palpably honest witness” for the claimant.

Although Language Empire’s managing director Yasar Zaman denied the claimant’s version of events, Judge Clarke said that his evidence was a “tangled mass of contradictions, inconsistencies, unlikelihoods, implausibilities and untruths”.

West Yorkshire Police’s contract with Language Empire is worth an estimated £2,506,000 over four years, with the other forces’ contracts at £1,788,000 combined over the same period. South Yorkshire Police’s contract is worth an estimated £783,000, with Humberside Police’s at £515,000 and North Yorkshire Police’s at £490,000. These were arranged by the forces’ Regional Procurement team.

A joint statement from the forces reads: “In light of the recent news regarding Language Empire Ltd, we are currently reviewing the information presented and our position in relation to the service.”

Language Empire said the court action related to issues “initiated by a sub-contractor”.