Posted on 03/02/2022 10:42:42 PM PST by algore
From a £230 unpaid bill to the loss of a £3m castle
Mrs Van Overwaele had allegedly refused to pay a £230 factor's bill relating to a bridalwear business she owned in Helensburgh in 1997. She claimed the bill had nothing to do with her.
The bill and the subsequent legal costs saw the debt soar to a reported £30,000 and in 2000 Mrs Van Overwaele was sequestrated - the Scottish legal term for being made legally bankrupt.
Her finances were taken over by an insolvency practitioner.
Knockderry Castle
Image caption, The 170-year-old Knockderry Castle is in Cove, Argyll and has been owned by Mrs Van Overwaele since the 1970s
The Belgian family fought the sequestration and mounted various legal actions including claims of assault, theft and destruction of property against an accountant.
Mrs Van Overwaele at points represented herself in court.
In August 2021, the Court of Session refused a "reclaiming motion" against Mrs Van Overwaele and Mr Amil which had ordered the siblings to vacate the castle. They argued their human rights had been breached after the decree had been granted in their absence.
At this stage the court ruling stated that creditors' claims were now in the region of several hundred thousand pounds.
In January this year, Mrs Van Overwaele lost a bid to take her case to the Supreme Court.
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Mrs van Overwaele had previously transferred ownership to Mr Amil and continued to live at the castle with her brother and his family.
Trustees have been trying to evict the family so that the castle can be sold to pay creditors.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
The Scots are a stubborn people.
“The Jews are harried and obstructed in Austria and Germany, and lately in France; but England and America give them an open field and yet survive. Scotland offers them an unembarrassed field too, but there are not many takers. There are a few Jews in Glasgow, and one in Aberdeen; but that is because they can’t earn enough to get away. The Scotch pay themselves that compliment, but it is authentic.”
Mark Twain
Not the bailiffs!
She can squeeze a nickle till the buffalo craps.
Yeah, the heating bills are annoying.
Back in the day, knights were sent out to ambush sleeping dragons.
They were then sold to rich dragophiles who tortured them to warm their fancies
LOL ive not heard that one before
It’s in his essay “Concerning the Jews”. Great read and not Jew hate or anything like that.
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1898twain-jews.asp
Or were you referring to the nickle? I like that one too.
Awesome architectural details but would require a staff of 25 pressure washers to maintain.
Not a castle. More of a manor house. And one that is in pretty bad shape. If its worth 3 million pounds, it must have a lot of land around it.
... and a team of stone masons, custom glaziers, slate roof specialists -— maybe an architect to run it all.
Bkmk
Weird that I see building these days and think, that could use a house wash.
Wonder if there are cherry pickers that would reach high enough to hit the roofs.
Man, that is one overwrought little “ castle”.
I’m at the age where getting out there with the new lawn or outdoor power tools and giving them a whiz DOES NOT get me excited.
Buying something triggers thoughts of “Oh God, now I have to fix it, clean it, maintain it, insure it, store it, register it, permit it, ...”
Could you tell me exactly where in that essay the buffalo-nickel line occurs? I scanned through it and couldn’t find that anywhere. I’m not really surprised that I couldn’t, though, since the buffalo nickel was introduced in 1913, some three years after Twain’s death.
The structure is in a state of disrepair likely due to funds going to legal.
If no litigation had occurred and the structure was maintained, the value would likely be around 5+ million GBP at least, rather than 3 million.
Hindsight teaches to pay unfounded nuisance bills “under protest” and then go after the collector legally.
230 GBP in 1997 is about $600 USD today, so it wasn’t small.
Sounds like she is a real nice lady who tried to stand her ground representing herself but got hammered by Scottish Courts for legal fees, raising the 1997 $600 equivalent bill to around $80k USD by 2000.
Before going off and saying she was stupid for not having a lawyer, keep in mind that her 1997 $600 bill would have more than tripled if she had retained an attorney, and she was convinced the bill was bogus that any reasonable person could see it was a lie. That doesn’t make her stupid, that makes her an easy prey for shark lawyers who were likely licking their chops over the prospect of taking her real estate which leads to a question of how a bill for a bridal business was secured against real estate?
Likely Scottish Law is an ass like most Scots are to begin with, and yes, I have some Scots-Irish DNA but that doesn’t stop me from telling the descendants of Scots to take their ‘compliance’ pointing fingers and shove it up their a$$. These are the people that would haul you to jail for not wearing a mask. They comprise some of the most unreasonable stupid people on Earth.
Ok, so in hindsight, she should have handled it differently, but that’s hindsight. Most people are like her, they are nice people that don’t understand that most courts are occupied by pencil-pushers who could never make it on the outside of their cushy government protectorate and who fancy themselves as demi-gods inside their fiefdom spaces.
That said, there are good lawyers and judges, rarer to find these days. The problem is they devolve into positions where they are unable to police their own club members because of time and growth of new normal dis-ethics inside the club. In such settings, the only recourse seems unfortunately to be violence, that is when the law breaks down or fails to uphold itself, the natives get angry and attack. Breakdown of law leads to unlawful behavior, duh. I witnessed this to occur from a distance in East Los Angeles in the 1980s, certain judges were confronted outside the courthouse and had the living crap beat out of them. The result was they tried to step down or call in sick.
She didn’t know better and she wasn’t expected to know better. She entered a snake pit while duped to think it’s where “justice resides.” There’s tens of millions of people like her; it’s not her fault, it’s the fault of a court system losing its grip and falling into the hands of aholes who relish the power that’s fallen into their laps, kind of like thieves given bags of money left to take to someone else but then they “can’t find” the someone else or some such crap excuse,and they end up billing their time against the funds left in their trust.
So pretend the Scottish court was not a complete farce, then we need to ask how in God’s name did a 1997 230 GBP bill climb to 30,000 GBP by year 2000?
The answer is lawyers and the judges that kiss each others behinds. They saw her, a rich landowner, as an easy mark, raised and lower their brows and chuckled quietly that payday had arrived.
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