Page 330 - FINAL MASTER 616pp 20-6-19
P. 330
As you and Mrs Hillgarth are no doubt fully conversant with, both myself and my two co- Directors maintained our sanity and mirrored Mrs Hillgarth’s threesome by agreeing to disagree with all her requests and assertions. We tried and we failed to convince all lessees of an extensive comprehensive affordable and sensible internals’ budget of approx. £25,000 initially rising to £27,000 with fees etc in 2012 [and well posted on our website] which Mrs Hillgarth rejected out of hand for some of the most ignorant and ill-informed reasons stated to date, namely she didn’t agree to MHML using individual suppliers as opposed to one main contractor [who sub-contracted anyway and loaded their sub-contractor’s cost by around 35% - which we proved to Mrs Hillgarth to little effect] but also she did not want both Internals and Externals to be executed concurrently [for reasons of available budgets etc – and believe it or not......because you require a different type of contractor to perform Internal and External workings?
I repeat, you just couldn’t make this up.
Scope of works/ specification
The objective of the Section 20 process is to ensure that the scope and specification of the works, and the contractors to carry it out, are duly approved by a majority of the leaseholders. However despite repeated requests the leaseholders never saw a properly drawn scope of works or specification.
This is totally untrue. Mrs Hillgarth was furnished with at least 4 of our Surveyor’s Schedule of Works as is well evidenced by the fact she was required to give same to her preferred contractor Wade for them to provide a quote. I also emailed her with the fourth asking if she was selling them.
She could not have provided a like for like quote from Wade [which she did eventually] to those tenders already organised and completed by our Surveyor. I’m reasonably certain that other lessees were also furnished if requested as it’s all on a simple pdf file for emailing and I would add, posting on our website.
Mrs Hillgarth was getting totally confused whilst refusing to accept the fact that all quotes from whoever have to follow one set of Works’ Specification which our Surveyor had drawn up. Both Mrs Hillgarth and one other lessee were gathering quotes from other quarters for no reason other than they either didn’t trust our Surveyor’s schedule or wished to produce their own schedule along with their own preferred contractors.
I have email after email evidencing the above if needed.
One very valid query to raise, is that one of Mrs Hillgarth’s group did invite a tender [based yes on the correct Schedule of Works] on 23rd June 2014 but that was never presented to MHML nor other lessees for their consideration. I would propose that the reason was it exceeded even Mrs Hillgarth’s £219,000 Wade quote and considered ridiculous..... or I admit, they simply declined to tender but it cannot be denied that they tendered from the supposed, never to have been advised to lessees, Schedule of Works dated Dec
Furthermore you have constantly declined to give details of the instructions which were given to your surveyor (Boyce Evens & Carpenter). An “Invitation to Tender” dated December 2013 was drawn up, but most of this seemed irrelevant and/or incomprehensible.