Page 20 - 53_PBC to Begg (Crime OCR)_12-7-16 (33pp)

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As I should have said in my 8 August letter in response to your request to discuss “points” over the phone... to quote Sam Goldwyn “a verbal contract is not worth the paper it’s printed on!”
It’s now quite obvious why you didn’t send me a copy of Mr White’s Witness Statement but relied on sending to my co-directors and our auditors which one can only presume was a bizarre tactic which spectacularly failed in every respect.
I cannot stress too robustly how disinterested are my co-Directors to your client’s well known rantings, which they have had previous experience of and made clear then of their disinterest as none of Mrs Hillgarth’s queries, complaints and innuendos had the slightest relevance to them professionally or indeed fiscally as indeed the queries raised were all considered simply mischievous and with a malevolence directed purely at myself.
Both my fellow co-directors consider Mrs Hilgarth’s innuendos and accusations unworthy of comment and are quite content for me to field what are very basic and very easily explained scenarios which for some reason you consider to be a fraudulent operation in charging a fee for Management services, not splitting Surveyor fees with those of the works full cost and logging all under “Reserves Utilised”.
Reference to outstanding sums due to AR Lawrence has been well covered. Or did you miss “Creditors” in my previous correspondence? The £1590 will be paid once the works can commence and finish in good weather, all as has been explained and proved in supplied correspondence. We never received any final demand nor writ for £1590 as it was never ever considered to be by MHML anything other than an outstanding creditor on our accounts. Tony White should have known better than to have signed Mrs Hillgarth’s prepared Witness Statement containing as did totally erroneous statements such as the Water Tank install, our BES electrics alleged outstanding invoice and even the reference to
17 the £1590 being refused to be paid.
In the course of correspondence between Mr Begg and Mr Brown-Constable between March and July 2016 some admissions have been made and some understanding has emerged as to the scale of the fraud perpetrated on the leaseholders.
18 (reply) exactly what fraud? Is common sense and economies fraud? I don’t think so.
As stated above, the original budget for the refurbishment was £105,019. This had been understood by the leaseholders to be the contract price tendered by AR Lawrence. However according to a letter from Mr Brown-Constable dated 14 June 2016 (see Item 6) this budget was in fact made up of two separate elements, namely £91,321 (the anticipated bill from AR Lawrence) and £13,698 (the anticipated bill from the surveyors Evens Boyce and Carpenter).
(reply) semantics and previously covered - I cannot believe the pettiness and irrelevance of this comment. As I previously explained, it would have been to our distinct advantage to split all costs, especially the surveyor’s costs, but it was far simpler and understandable to
19 have one main final cost to include everything, including vat and fees.
It is fair to say that the lessees had not actually understood that the surveyor's charges were included in the original £105,019 budget, since MHML's Section 20 letter of 22 June 2014 had referred only to the cost of engaging AR Lawrence. No mention had been made of the surveyors. And in a subsequent e-mail of 11 September 2014 (see Item 7) Mr Brown-Constable confirmed to Mrs Hillgarth that the works "are being done by your preferred contractor A&R Lawrence for the agreed budget of £115,019".