Baltimore County has to pay 700k
Staff Writer
2011-01-12
.dmvblogspot.bloggieblog.com .
Bowie & Jensen is pleased to announce that today the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion affirming that Baltimore County is liable for breach of contract by wrongly terminating its contract to purchase all petroleum products exclusively from an Indiana petroleum vendor, Petroleum Traders Corporation. The County lost the case (no. 09-2097) after a jury trial in May of 2009, and then appealed to the federal court in Richmond, arguing that its contract with PTC never existed because the right people in the County government did not approve it.
The County had admitted that all of the more than 5,600 other commodities and related contracts with other vendors over a period of years had been approved in the identical manner, and thus, took the position that it could declare PTC’s and any of these contracts void whenever it decided that the contract terms were no longer to the County’s benefit.