Legal WTF...
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Recently, a local authority in New Zealand found that it had moved some houses off a flood plain without first obtaining the appropriate resource consent from itself. In retaliation for this action, the council took itself to court. And won. And lost.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10428897
The council was ordered to pay $4800 ... to itself. A councillor was quoted as saying "We feel vindicated by this decision". Amusingly, the cost of the legal action outweighed the fine - the council had sought independent legal advice at $3000, and had hired prosectution and defense lawyers.
Truly amusing is the similarity to an article on BBSpot, known for completely impossible satire.
I'll be the first to say: WTF?
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If it wasn't for the fact that it was an outright waste of public money, I'd *almost* have to agree with doing that. Well no, not really, that was a really lame thing to do.
The individual decision makers should have been disciplined/fired as appropriate. An entity suing itself is just absurd. No matter the decision, exactly zero benefit could have come from it.
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How bizarre.
I could, however, see this making some sort of sense, if and only if there was a need to prosecute a test case about something. For all other cases, this is just government waste at its best.
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Impossible? I work in the Mother of all Bureaucracies, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that it is quite possible that the left hand doesn't know, or care, what the right hand is doing.
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It's not just governments, some corporations are sufficiently schizoid to do it. Sony in particular is notorious for frequently having one division of the company suing another.
