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From: Peter Begg pbegg@tarsus.co.uk Subject: RE: Mitre House - Without prejudice
Date: 13 June 2017 at 23:55
To: Paul B_C studio@graffiti.biz
Cc: J.Raja@jraja.co.uk, segar_9@hotmail.com Dear Mr Brown-Constable,
Thank you for your “Without Prejudice” e-mail of 13 June 2017 in which you ask me to “have a think” about the audio recording you have sent to myself (and others), which purports to be of your MHML board meeting of 23 May 2014.
I have thought about it. The general advice to those in a hole is normally to stop digging. However you seem to be digging a bigger and bigger hole for yourself with reckless disregard for the most basic requirements of the law.
You must be aware of the legal restraints on recording of conversations without consent since you refer in a separate e-mail of the same date to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. So you will be aware that you are not allowed to share this recording with anyone else without Mrs Hillgarth’s consent, which you do not have. You must also be aware that it is not admissible in court. Also, if MHML is storing personal information of this nature the company must be registered with the Data Protection Commissioner.
What your recording purports to demonstrate is that Mrs Hillgarth was aware on 23 May 2014 of the “savings” you were planning to make and of the “additional work” that you planned to carry out with the monies saved. In that case it seems surprising that in the official MHML minutes of that meeting it was recorded (at Mrs Hillgarth’s insistence) that the work was to be carried out exclusively by AR Lawrence. And even more surprising that it was also recorded in the subsequent Section 20 letter of 22 June 2014 (accepted by all the leaseholders) that the work was to be carried out exclusively by AR Lawrence.
There was no mention in those documents of yourself or MHML doing the work. In fact in an e-mail to you from Diego Fortunati dated 20 June 2014 timed at 01:01 he complained at the lack of disclosure as to who would perform the actual work and made perfectly clear, on behalf of all the (non-MHML) leaseholders, that you were not to undertake any of the work yourself. He said explicitly and in bold print to emphasise his point:
“I do not consent to the works proposed by you under the Management Proposal or to your proposal to start minor workings during the summer. Should you proceed with your proposed refurbishment, you are at risk of being held personally liable for any money spent”.
Thus the position of the non-MHML leaseholders was abundantly clear. And the implication of what you are claiming in this audio clip is that Mrs Hillgarth was engaged in a conspiracy with the directors of MHML to defraud the non-MHML leaseholders, who plainly did not want you to do any of the work yourself. However if Mrs Hillgarth had been aware of and connived in what you planned, it seems extraordinary that on 11 September 2014 (having discovered that you were doing some of the work yourself) she should have written to you to enquire what was going on and to request a breakdown of the costs of the internal work.
In your response of the same date you stated that you were not doing the works yourself; “They are being done by your preferred contractor A&R Lawrence for the agreed budget of £115,019.” Actually, as you must have known, that was not the truth. Indeed we have a copy of a letter from Evens Boyce to AR Lawrence dated 14 July 2014 from which it is clear that when you wrote that letter of 11 September you had already reduced the contract sum for AR Lawrence to £63,828 plus VAT. (You were subsequently to reduce it again to £53,000 plus VAT).