Sellers beware: your liability for environmental pollution cannot be on-sold!

The judgment will have a profound effect on land subject to a directive at the time that it is sold, and will materially impact the considerations taken into account by both purchasers and sellers alike.  The import of the judgment also testifies to the need to ensure that obligations contained within directives are duly complied with and, once discharged, that these directives are uplifted.  It also underscores the need to ensure that when pre-cursors to directives are issued by the Department (commonly known as pre-directives), they are appropriately dealt with through legal mechanisms at an early stage in order to prevent a final and binding directive being issued.
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