Case No. CC-12-P-01174

32.In the Second Account Judgment I disallowed payments to directors as a deductible cost on the ground that such payments were decided by Mr and Mrs Lloyd, who together own 90% of Design & Display’s shares, and that it could not be assumed that they bore any relation to the contribution made by Mr and Mrs Lloyd to the business or any part of it, including the infringing business. 33.Design & Display submitted that the same reasoning should not apply to the directors’ NIC, national insurance contributions paid as a consequence of remunerating its directors. It should also not apply to dividends paid to directors other than Mr and Mrs Lloyd, specifically to the manufacturing director and to the technical sales estimating director. Design & Display has therefore deducted these as costs in respect of both ‘wages and salaries’ and ‘administrative expenses’. 34.With regard to NIC contributions, Design & Display argued more specifically that a defendant in an account of profits must be taken as the claimant finds it. Further, the NIC payments were not to the directors at all but to HMRC. They should therefore be allowed as deductible costs. 35.It seems to me beside the point that the NIC contributions were not paid to the directors. They arose out of payments to the directors and for the reasons given in the Second Account Judgment cannot be said to bear any relation to the contribution of the directors to the business as a whole or, thus, to the infringing business. They should therefore not be deducted.