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l lack of provision of full and/or adequate service charge accounts for the years ending 31 December 2014 and 31 December 2015 to the long leaseholders;
2
Mr. Belafonte has not yet to my knowledge made his final decision as to whether or not the very first request we have ever received for any annual accounts [since 2012, the year we took the reins] documents, save for that received from Mrs Hillgarth on 17 December 2015 to have copies of certain relevant invoices from our year ended 2014 Accounts dated 30 May 2015, was in fact a valid request seeing as it came 17 days outside of the Landlord & Tenant Act 1985 Section 22 statute, stating requests must be made within 6 months.
We also requested of Mrs Hillgarth’s Mr. Begg the same request as to the situation [see my further comments below regarding this affair, offer to comply, non acknowledgement etc].
Unaware as I am as to when Mrs Hillgarth and other lessees made their concerns known to our Freeholder [as I was under the impression that all and every query, accusation, innuendo etc had been fully and comprehensively answered in lengthy correspondence with Mrs Hillgarth’s Mr. Begg including your points 1 - 5 below], I have attached my comments to each below on the understanding that they are the same [almost..Item 1..?) as given to Mr. Begg:
(reply) we, (the "Company") have issued annual Service Charge Accounts since year ended 2012, all well within the six month deadline required to do so and have never ever received either comment, query nor request for any information, confirmation nor document from any lessee until we received an email from Mrs Hillgarth on 17 December 2015 requesting sight of some invoices relevant to our major External/Internal works from our year ended 2014 Service Charge Accounts dated 30 May 2015
I replied by return to Mrs Hillgarth’s 17 December 2015 request saying it was pretty near Christmas and I’d be away till New Year but did she realise that her request was outside of the Landlord & Tenant Act Section 22 deadline of 6 months. I didn’t hear back until receipt of Mrs Hillgarth’s follow up letter from her Mr. Begg on 23 March 2016, to which I immediately replied and I again referenced the statute (which is well indicated in her lease and on the reverse of all Quarterly Demands) but I still offered to courier over the documents.
Our offer to comply was totally ignored and remained totally unacknowledged. When it eventually was we had in the meantime also sent very lengthy correspondence and bundles of documents to disprove multiple slurs, innuendos and accusations made in Mr. Begg’s lengthy 13pp diatribe against myself and (the "Company"). We requested confirmation that we had satisfactorily disproved the accusations etc
Again none was forthcoming and to date none has been received, and consequently we were advised that we were not obliged to accede to Mr. Begg’s insistence of viewing the requested documents due to the statute etc and more importantly, the accusations were of such a serious nature that failing confirmation they were disproved we (the "Company") would be in very serious jeopardy both legally and morally.
Since then both RBK&C and obviously our Freeholder [and Macfarlanes] have now been contacted, and this despite everything we were accused of has been, as far as we are concerned, totally disproved, and as we requested in all correspondence, that if anything we have stated has not disproved or explained comprehen- sively all queries and accusations, then please advise. None has ever been received to date.
Mr. Begg, to my certain knowledge, nor any lessee including Mrs hillgarth has ever queried, as you state:
“lack of provision of full and/or adequate service charge accounts for the years ending 31 December 2014 and 31 December 2015 to the long leaseholders;” So I’m hoping that is in error.
2 failure to produce proper invoices relating to the section 20 procedure commenced in June 2014;
(reply) This is a perfect example of what we were accused of and disproved totally in correspondence. Mind you, so long as I understand your point correctly, we progressed works that would normally have required Section 20 Notices, but well prior to the works commencing, we fully advised and then requested and received 100% agreement from all lessees to agree to voluntarily contribute their percentage share without the necessity of s.20 Notices, but made it 100% clear that if just one lessee objected, we could not proceed.
The reason for this admittedly unusual situation was because both works required scaffolding in place and seeing as we had scaffolding in place for our major works, we could save time and money by doing quickly.
We saved £2153 which adds credence to our statement. All in correspondence with Mrs Hillgarth’s Mr. Begg.