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the workings legally required to do for both Internals and Externals within the terms of the Head Lease.
It was explained to Mrs Hillgarth that these savings, however accomplished, would then be used to fund those items that Mrs Hillgarth had requested of Wade/Hemi to initially quote for but had not been included in the final Surveyor’s Schedule of Works as they were considered unaffordable.
Mrs Hillgarth agreed to this proposal and verbally exclaimed that the savings to be made and used for unaffordable items “will make everybody happy”.
When the service charge accounts for the year to 31 December 2014 (see Item 4 of the Second Schedule) were subsequently presented to the leaseholders, there were no details at all of the costs paid to AR Lawrence or any other contractors in respect of the refurbishment activity. There was simply a (wholly inadequate) item called “Reserves utilised” which showed an aggregate figure of £105,877 against the budgeted figure of £105,019.38 for the agreed works. But it was totally unclear from the accounts whether the whole of this sum of £105,877 had been paid to AR Lawrence & Sons Ltd, and (if not) to whom any balance had been paid.
Not only Mrs Hillgarth (on 10 and 15 December 2015), but other leaseholders including Diego Fortunati from Flat 9 (on 17 and 21 December 2015) and Christopher Lee-Pemberton from Flat 8 (since May 2015) all pressed Mr Brown-Constable, without success, to provide relevant details of the refurbishment work carried out and a proper breakdown of the “reserves utilised” figure, in order to understand who had been paid how much for doing what.
Reply: In Mrs Hillgarth’s own Witness Statement (para 73) she admits that neither she nor any other lessee had requested information as stated.
Having failed to obtain any relevant information from MHML, Mrs Hillgarth made contact with Mr Tony White, the Managing Director of AR Lawrence in June 2016. Mr White, who had not in fact been paid all the money that was owed to his firm by MHML, agreed to provide a Witness Statement (attached as Item 5 of the Second Schedule) in relation to his involvement with the refurbishment. Under that Witness Statement it became apparent that the specification originally provided to the building contractors had been substantially reduced on the instructions of Mr Brown-Constable, and that they had only been paid £62,010 against the budgeted expenditure of £105,019. The leaseholders had never been informed of this.
In that instance in order to be able to do the work himself Mr Brown-Constable had told Tony White that he did not have enough money in reserves to pay him to carry out the original specification, (although the record showed that from the outset he had well over the budgeted amount to pay for the full specification).
In the course of correspondence between myself and Mr Brown-Constable between March and July 2016 certain admissions were made and some understanding emerged as to the scale of the fraud perpetrated on the leaseholders. Mr Brown-Constable now admits that some of the work on the refurbishment was done by himself and/or through (unapproved) contractors. In response to my letter to him dated 23 March 2016 Mr Brown-Constable specifically mentions the following items as having been carried out by him or his contractors: