Reselling line rental!

ademoore

An odd question this one, and not much to do with accounting!! A client recently lost a major contract with local government as it was awarded to competitor based on price. My client still holds the phone number that the 'area' calls for their services, and wants to re-sell this number to the new competitor for quite a bit more than he is paying himself - the number is important as already well known!

Looking around the internet, I can't find anything solid to say he can't, but it just feels wrong on a legal basis, and i wont even go into the bookkeeping questions that followed - any one else know about these things, or have any experience?

Thanks, much appreciated!

Monsoon

First port of call is to look at their original contract to see if that says anything pertinent. Does your client actually own the number? If they do, I can't think of anything legal that would prevent them from selling on something they own - the only thing that might come into play is some kind of 'squatting' type rule where by if I bought tesco.com (assuming it wasn't already taken) I couldn't hold it to ransom to Tesco for lots of money, I would just have to hand it over. That's a specific rule for domain names though and you would need to get legal advice really. Various subscription services offer a legal helpine so if you've not got access to one then that's a cheap way of doing it.

If the council don't own the number I would guess that that is their (big) mistake and, subject to no legal restrictions, they may have to pay for their number!

Bookkeeping is simple, surey its just a sale?