Civil Case (Be’er Sheva) 7137-09-18 Netanel Attias v. Alon Goren - part 118

In Civil Appeal 378/96 Weinblatt v.  Bornstein, 55(3) 247 (2000), the court addressed the appellant's arguments that he chose to invest his money in securities of a certain company, on the basis of alleged fraud and misrepresentations regarding the company's situation.  The question that was to be decided in that matter was whether the plaintiff was entitled to compensation on the basis of his claim that he had lost an alternative investment opportunity.  The court ruled that as a rule, the law recognizes the right of a victim of a fraudulent act to receive remedies that will protect his reliance interest.  However, after the fact, an investor will always be able to point to other securities whose performance exceeded that of the security he purchased, and to alternative investments that yielded profits that exceeded the return received on his investment, but from the outset the investor has no certainty that an investment in this or that security will yield him a profit at all, or a profit that exceeds the profit he actually generated in particular.  In this context, it was held, "It is not enough for the investor to point out that at the time he made his investment decision, alternative securities existed, which in retrospect turned out to be more profitable, in order to establish his right to compensation for the loss of an alternative investment.  In order to establish the existence of damage of the type of loss of an alternative investment, the investor must show that if it were not for the misrepresentation and acts of fraud, it is reasonable to assume that he would have invested his money in one of those alternative investment channels that produced a greater return than the one he actually received for his investment...".  In our case, when examining the position of each of the litigants in his interrogation, it is possible to identify a significant difference in relation to the question of where they would otherwise have invested their money, if at all, and therefore the attempt to derive a uniform cause of action for all of them raises a great difficulty.  In any event, none of the plaintiffs indicated with certainty the existence of a particular alternative investment that was on the agenda at the time that could have yielded a higher return.