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12 Furthermore despite Mr Brown-Constable's assurance that Mitre House was not being used for busi- ness, the common parts of the building in the basement are also being used as his personal office. This area does not belong to him, the room in question is for the electrics of the building and is therefore dan- gerous. In my view all the contents should be removed at once.
(comment/reply) now I have an office in the basement and my flat and Knightsbridge, Dorset and Sri Lanka....
13The role of a professional managing agent implies appropriate training and qualifications, relevant ex- pertise, a relevant regulatory authority (such as the RICS or the Association of Residential Managing Agents), a code of conduct, professional indemnity insurance, complaints procedures and so on. Mr Brown-Constable has none of these things. He is a graphic designer by qualification. Many of the lease- holders (including myself) have always resented paying for his (unqualified) services the same sort of charge as we would have to pay for a properly qualified agent. He has no office costs to cover, no per- sonnel costs, (I believe) no professional indemnity insurance, and no relevant expertise. Of course I cannot be certain that MHML carries no professional indemnity insurance, but when challenged by my solicitor on the point Mr BrownConstable declined to assert (as he could have done) that it did.
(comment/reply) - now it’s “no office costs to cover”.... I think 24/7 on site attention with a 24/7 con- tact phone all for £10 a day is pretty reasonable - MHML does have all required expertise and most if not all required professional representation and memberships but admittedly, as we are only represent 9 flats which includes we three directors of MHML we keep costs down to an ab- solute minimum as opposed to a large Agent representing multiple buildings with multiple flats etc....
The MHML website
14 Perhaps to justify these fees, and in spite of his lack of qualifications or relevant expertise, Mr Brown- Constable used to hold himself out, on his Mitre House website at http://www.mitrehouse.com/mitre- house-management-Iimited.html. as having relevant property management experience. He asserted, amongst many other claims, that MHML was "the most used RTM service provider", "forms over 85% of all RTM companies", carried £3 million of professional indemnity cover and had experience of handling collective freehold enfranchisement applications. These representations were completely untrue. Mr Brown-Constable had simply plagiarised the website of a well established professional management company called Canonbury Management, even to the extent of downloading all of their terms and condi- tions of business on to the Mitre House website. He had simply changed the corporate name, wherever it appeared, from Canonbury to MHML.
15Recently Canonbury were alerted to this breach of their copyright and, acting through their lawyers Mishcon de Reya, forced Mr Brown-Constable to take down the offending text from the Mitre House website. However I retained copies of the relevant website text for evidential purposes.
(Comment/reply) - yes, guilty as charged I’m afraid - but Canonbury graciously accepted our apol- ogy and the case was closed - within hours. Mind you, seeing as Mrs Hillgarth had complained about our www.mitrehouse.com website having initially applauded its idea, I do think it very petty to have made such a mountain out of a molehill...but that’s typical of Mrs Hillgarth - spiteful and vengeful!
The 2014 refurbishment project
16 Difficulties with Mr Brown-Constable came to a head during the course of a comprehensive refurbish- ment of Mitre House in 2014 (both external repairs and internal redecorative work to the common parts). Under the terms of the head lease the interior was supposed to be redone every 7 years and the exte- rior every 5 years, but this was well overdue due to the fact that Mr Brown-Constable was reluctant to spend any money.
(comment/reply) this I can’t believe - it was exactly the opposite - MHML were desperate to get both works underway as soon as possible - correspondence supplied to date amply evidences that it was Mrs Hillgarth holding up proceedings by wanting to spend funds well in excess of what was in Reserves in total contradiction to MHML’s stated economies. Mrs Hillgarth delayed