Kalvar Corp. v. Burrow

493 S.W.2d 48, 1973 Mo. App. LEXIS 1287
CourtMissouri Court of Appeals
DecidedMarch 5, 1973
DocketNo. 25969
StatusPublished
Cited by3 cases

This text of 493 S.W.2d 48 (Kalvar Corp. v. Burrow) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Missouri Court of Appeals primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Kalvar Corp. v. Burrow, 493 S.W.2d 48, 1973 Mo. App. LEXIS 1287 (Mo. Ct. App. 1973).

Opinion

WASSERSTROM, Judge.

From an adverse ruling on his motion to quash garnishment under a judgment entered against him in 1969, the judgment debtor appeals. The ground for the motion to quash was that collection of the judgment is barred by a discharge in bankruptcy granted to appellant on December 8, 1970. The determinative issue is whether the judgment creditor’s claim is of a nature barred from discharge by § 17(a)(2) of the Bankruptcy Act.

The underlying facts are these. Appellant operated as a franchise distributor for S. O. Systems, a subsidiary of respondent, until June 30, 1966. The franchise agreement provided for S. O. Systems to furnish appellant with merchandise on consignment. Whenever appellant made a sale, he was to deposit the proceeds in a bank account maintained in the name of the consignor S. O. Systems. Then, after receipt of those funds, the consignor was to make payment to appellant of the commission due to him.

A dispute arose between the parties in the latter half of 1965 pertaining to commission due to appellant arising from certain sales to the Internal Revenue Service in Kansas City. S. O. Systems failed to render an accounting to appellant concerning those sales for a period extending from July, 1965 to January, 1966, and as a result appellant began withholding the proceeds from the sale of consigned goods. He took the position that “when you pay me, I will pay you”.

Some correspondence and discussions occurred between the parties in January, 1966, with respect to this matter, but appellant continued to withhold sale proceeds. Thereafter, in April, 1966, respondent completed taking over all of the operations and assets of its subsidiary S. O. Systems, and as part of that acquisition the accounts receivable from appellant to S. O. Systems were assigned to the parent corporation.

Appellant terminated his franchise effective June 30, 1966. At that time he had accumulated over $4,000.00 in proceeds of consigned sales which he had withheld. In addition, an inventory taken at the conclusion of the franchise disclosed an inventory shortage of $2,617.22. A third item of claim against appellant consisted of $315.00 which had been advanced to him on April, 1, 1966, against estimated March commissions.

Respondent filed suit for all three elements of claim in the circuit court and received judgment in full. Thereafter, appellant filed a petition in bankruptcy listing respondent as a creditor, and the bankruptcy court issued its usual general order enjoining all State court proceedings. However, concurrently with the entry of the order of discharge in bankruptcy, the bankruptcy court modified its stay order so as to permit respondent to proceed in the State court to enforce its judgment. Execution and garnishment then followed in the court below.

Before addressing the substantive problem presented, we must consider sua [50]*50sponte a preliminary jurisdictional question. Appellant’s notice of appeal states that the appeal is being taken “from the order entered in this action on the first day of October, 1971”. The order of that date was the overruling of appellant’s motion to quash. That order was not appeal-able. Household Finance Corp. v. Seigel-Robert Plating Co., Mo.App., 483 S.W.2d 415, is directly in point and holds that the overruling of a motion to quash garnishment cannot constitute a final judgment since “an examination of the garnishment statutes clearly shows that there are definite proceedings to be followed before the final judgment is entered”.

However, the procedural situation in the present case is distinguishable from the Household Finance Corp. case. When this procedural problem was called to the attention of counsel at oral argument, both agreed that there had in fact been action in the trial court beyond merely the overruling of a motion to quash. With the permission of the court, the parties have filed stipulation showing the further procedural facts, including the payment of the garnishment proceeds into the registry of the court and the entry of an order by the trial court directing the payment of those proceeds to the respondent. In view of those circumstances, all of the procedural steps contemplated by the garnishment statutes have been complied with, and no purpose would be served by remanding these proceedings. The stipulation will be treated as a supplemental transcript.

This still leaves a defect in the notice of appeal, in that on its face it seeks to review a nonappealable order. This defect is, however, purely formal in nature, and we will treat the notice of appeal as though it had specified the order dated October 13, 1971, under which the trial court required the clerk to pay the garnishment proceeds to respondent. See World Franchisers, Inc. v. Birk, Mo.App., 456 S.W.2d 606.

We turn now to the sole point contained in appellant’s Points and Authorities, which is that the court below erred in overruling the motion to quash because “defendant’s indebtedness was discharged in bankruptcy”. The resolution of this issue depends upon interpretation of § 17(a)(2) of the Bankruptcy Act, 11 U.S. C.A. § 35(a)(2), as it read on December 8, 1970, which was the date of appellant’s discharge in bankruptcy. The statute at that time, which was prior to the effective date of the 1970 amendment, read as follows:

“A discharge in bankruptcy shall release a bankrupt from all of his provable debts, whether allowable in full or in part, except such as . are liabilities . . . for willful and malicious injuries to the . . . property of another . . . ”

For our purposes, the principles controlling the construction of this provision are contained in the opinions of the United States Supreme Court in Tinker v. Colwell, 193 U.S. 473, 24 S.Ct. 505, 48 L.Ed. 754 and McIntyre v. Kavanaugh, 242 U.S. 138, 37 S.Ct. 38, 61 L.Ed. 205. In the Tinker case the Court held that in order to come within this exception to a discharge in bankruptcy, it is not necessary that the creditor show that the bankrupt was actuated by personal malevolence. On the contrary, the court approved interpreting the term malice for this purpose as meaning “a wrongful act, done intentionally, without just cause or excuse”. The Court further held:

“[W]e think a wilful disregard of what one knows to be his duty, an act which is against good morals, and wrongful in and of itself, and which necessarily causes injury and is done intentionally, may be said to be done wil-fully and maliciously, so as to come within the exception.”

The principle of the Tinker case was applied in the McIntyre case, which involved [51]*51a misappropriation by stock brokers to their own use of securities which had been left in their care by their customer. The Court specifically rejected an argument that the exception in question had never been intended to include conversion.

Applying these principles, there is a substantial line of cases holding that the sale of consigned property and the failure of the consignee to account for the proceeds to the consignor constitutes a willful and malicious injury to the property of the consignor and that the claim based upon that misappropriation is barred from discharge in bankruptcy. Baker v.

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Bluebook (online)
493 S.W.2d 48, 1973 Mo. App. LEXIS 1287, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/kalvar-corp-v-burrow-moctapp-1973.