Page 374 - FINAL MASTER 616pp 20-6-19

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77 On 6 October 2014 he sent me a cheque for £67.26, having offset, against an MHML dividend of £2,650 properly payable to me as a shareholder, charges amounting to £2,582.74 for time apparently spent by Mr Brown-Constable and his co-directors in dealing with our "Right to Manage" application. As I have said, MHML's invoice in respect of those charges had originally been addressed to our special purpose RTM com- pany, although that company had never agreed to pay those charges. Nor had I. And neither myself nor the RTM company had any legal obligation to pay those charges. For his convenience, Mr Brown-Constable sim- ply chose to offset this sum against a dividend payable to me out of MHML's reserves.
78 In fact I decided not to cash the cheque for £67.26 which Mr Brown-Constable sent me, and have still not done so. That would have been to accept an unlawful offset, which I was not prepared to do.
(comment/reply) But quite happy to place herself in a position of unlawful pecuniary advantage by signing off her Tenancy Agreements stating she has received all required permissions (to sub-let).
(comment/reply) - 74 - 78 all comprehensively covered in previous correspondence but I will rely on the Tribunal to explain to Mrs Hillgarth the consequences of leading an RTM, most especially whilst remaining as a Director of both the gamekeeper and the poacher! There are costs involved and those costs are recoverable - we recovered ours at least. Legally. No Dividends have ever been paid by MHML.
Investigations by the leaseholders
79 I was also very dissatisfied that I had been denied access to information about the internal and external refur- bishment work carried out at Mitre House. A number of us had been pressing Mr Brown-Constable, without success, to provide relevant details of the work being carried out and a proper breakdown of who was being paid for doing what. Looking at my exchange of (numerous and extremely unpleasant) e-mails with him on 6 October 2014, when he had been attempting to intimidate, bully and blackmail me into paying over his £2,000 "arrears" I said (using capital letters for emphasis): " ... it is hard to understand what we are paying for within the £105,000 and this is what EVERYONE WANTS TO KNOW AND WHAT WE KEEP ON AND ON AND ON ASKING FOR, AND HAVE DONE FOR MONTHS ON END". The capital letters I used here were to emphasise the state of exasperation I was feeling.
80 In his e-mail to me dated 23 March 2015, in response to my numerous requests to see the invoices relating to the water tank, the Sky TV aerial, the window repairs etc, Mr Brown-Constable said: "Those invoices you are now requesting ..... will be available to view once the annual accounts are finalised. - They weren't. In- stead he insisted on supplying his own MHML invoices. One of them, described as a "Special Invoice" from MHML dated 7 October 2014 to re-cable and re-install your Flat 5 existing Sky dish to Mitre House Commu- nal system" does not say (as one might reasonably have expected): "as carried out and invoiced by [named] installers" but rather "as quo ted/cos ted by [unnamed] installers". It reads as though Mr Brown-Constable ob- tained a quote for doing this work and charged us the amount quoted, but then a arranged for the work to be carried out through another (cheaper) contractor. This remains unresolved.
81Nor did we receive any answers to our questions when the Service Charge Annual Accounts eventually ar- rived on 8 June 2015. In those accounts Mr Brown-Constable said: "As regards the recent external/internal works, Reserves utilised amounted to £105,877 against the agreed Works (Exterior & Interior) budget of £105,019 set [out] in the Section 20 Notice dated 22nd June 2014 --- copy attached". There was no break- down of who had done what and for how much of the sort that we had been anticipating.
82As I have previously stated, the leaseholders had been given to understand that the whole of this sum of £105,877 was being paid to AR Lawrence & Sons Ltd. However it was not. I have subsequently learned through Mr Tony White (the owner of AR Lawrence) that actually only £62,010 has been paid to AR Lawrence.
83A letter from Boyce Evans & Carpenter (surveyors to the project) dated 14 July 2014 which Mr White has subsequently sent me shows that following the section 20 process the original specification agreed with AR Lawrence was in fact amended (without the knowledge or approval of the leaseholders) to exclude certain works, and that the contract sum was accordingly reduced to £63,828 plus VAT (ie £76,592 in total). A subse-