72_Begg to PBC_9-12-16 (5pp)

Paul Brown-Constable Esq; Flat 7, Mitre House
124 King's Road,
London SW3 4TP
9 December 2016
PFC Begg
Solicitor
9th Floor
Metro Building 1, Butterwick Hammersmith London W6 8DL
Tel: O20 8846 2705
Dear Mr Brown-Constable,
Mitre House Management Limited
Thank you for your response to my letter dated 7 November 2016.
I note your continuing efforts to obfuscate the key issues — not least by repeating in full (no less than four times) the entire text of your e-mail of 11 September 2014, by which you clearly set great store. However in spite of all the correspondence, and several hundred pages of your irrelevant attachments designed to distract from the key issues, I think the picture is now pretty clear. It is time to summarise where things currently stand, and to identify the outstanding issues.
Firstly there are the serious issues of criminal fraud and blackmail, which you deny. However given that these are matters for a criminal court, and not within our control, I am proposing to focus in this letter exclusively on matters within the jurisdiction of the First-Tier Property Tribunal.
We say that you were in breach of section 20 in so far as you altered the scope of the specification agreed on 22 June 2014 and used unapproved contractors (including yourself) to carry out some of the work. This-was done on false pretences — namely that you were saving money for the lessees.In reality the objective was to make money for yourself. You have admitted in correspondence:
(a) that you departed from the agreed schedule of works in so far as you carried out "additional works "; and
(b) that you changed the agreed décor to one of your own choosing; and
(c) that you did not use AR Lawrence exclusively for the works but engaged other contractors,
including electricians and carpenters, who were not supervised by AR Lawrence; and
(d) that you did some of the work yourself and that some part of the £31,765 was used to pay you personally (”my goodself’, as you put it); and
(e) that there was an unauthorised overspend of £858; and
(f) that you have offset, against retained shareholders funds attributable to Mr Hillgarth, the sum of £2,582.74 in respect of MHML's charges for dealing with the failed RTM application.
We say the extra work you claim to have done is irrelevant. It was neither requested, nor was it necessary, and you carried it out in a very poor way (photographs will be available in due course).
Then there are the issues on which we disagree, or where there is a dispute as to the facts, which will need to be determined by the court. These are:
1. We say that the admissions (a) to (f) above clearly put you in breach of Section 20, the legal conse- quence of which is that MHML and/or yourself are obliged to repay to the lessees all sums expended by them on the refurbishment in excess of £250. Your position appears to be that you were not in breach of Section 20 because:
(a) All the work was (you say) either done by AR Lawrence or subcontractors of AR Lawrence. In your letter to me dated 10 June 2016 you said that: "all my work was done with approval and under supervision by both AR Lawrence and our Surveyor". You claimed that had your work ' been of "substandard or unprofessional quality .....it would have been required to be corrected by both AR Lawrence and our Surveyor." You have asked me for an example — ”just one" of