Posted on 05/18/2011 5:44:38 AM PDT by Roger_Wildcat
A landlord has blocked off his plush £1m home with ten skips to stop his tenants from leaving without paying the £15,000 he claims they owe him.
Businessman Simon Everingham says he has been in a constant battle for £3,000-a-month rent since the occupants of his four-bedroom 18th century farmhouse in Markington, near Harrogate, North Yorkshire, fell behind with the payments last November.
He barricaded the American tenants Dan and Christina Herring in by blocking the drive on Monday and the fight to stop them leaving continued today.
They work at the controversial Menwith Hill U.S. spy base nearby but say they now need to return to the United States after Mr Herring found a new job.
Mr Everingham, 54, fears that if the family leave the country he will never get his money back.
He claims he is owed rent arrears, legal fees and interest payments.
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(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Financial shenanigans could cause them to lose their high security clearances.
I've been a landlord since I was 26. I have learned many things about renters over the last 31 years.
1. It is a business and you need to run it that way.
2. A tenant telling you their financial problems does not make it your problem.
3. If a tenant says I don't have the rent. You ask how much do you have. If the answer is none, they're gone. If the answer is all but $20, I work with them.
4. There are good tenants that realize that I am providing them a place to live in a neighborhood that is better than they could buy in. And they pay.
5. When I deliver a 3 day notice to pay or quit. I'm not kidding. Once I start an eviction, I don't turn back. And if I do evict you, I will do everything I can to ruin your credit so you do not do it to another landlord.
I need tenants, some are good, some are bad. I have gotten pretty good at picking the good ones. (Knock on wood.)
White trash.
I notice the one person he didn’t contact was the base commander. If a U.S. service member tried this kind of sh*t, his CO would be on him like white on rice, like Micheal Moore on a cheeseburger, like Bwaney Fwank on a tube steak.
Being a derelict deadbeat seriously harms our relationships around the world. Especially with a long-time friend and ally like the UK.
For those that don’t know....
This ‘facility’ is where the government has been spying on US citizens phone calls and everything else since the 1970s 1980s.
To get around the pesky Constitution, they allowed the Brits to do the spying on us, and we spy on them. And then trade information. I could have told you this 15 years ago, but no one would have believed me. But things, they are a changin’.
Nice huh?
Got pitchfork?
And it shouldn’t be.
It seems the people at the base know what is going on. The deadbeats have 20 of their friends moving their furniture out. How does one find 20 people willing to do something like this?
Many of those are the moving crew from a company.
What’s a skip?
Sheesh!
;)
Too big to put in the boot.
Thank you for the information. In the article it sounded like it was 20 friends who were helping them. I can’t imagine knowing 20 people who would do something like that.
furthermore they are probably both drawing a tax-free US government-paid housing allowance
there are deadbeats in all walks of life, the richest are sometimes the worst, I hope the Brit guy can get his unpaid debt noted in their credit records
why isn’t evidence that local debts have been paid (especially leases) part of the required outprocessing paperwork?
Why would you say that? Why not just open the vault of all our security systems to whoever wants to kill us?
I don’t know, I would have to go ask.
The article seems to deal with the landlord's side of the story extensively, but I don't see much from the tenant's perspective. That may be because the tenant really does owe all this money and doesn't really want to talk to a newspaper about it. But it may also be because they don't really owe the money, they're working quietly through other channels to deal with the landlord, and as foreign nationals involved with the US military or intelligence services, they've been told to keep their mouths shut. Or perhaps, the newspaper found its “hook” and wasn't interested in their side of the story.
Since your wife is helping this family, do you have any insight as to the actual situation, here? It sounds like they might owe one month's rent, and are being charged 12K pounds in penalties and interest. I've been a landlord, and frankly, when folks paid me late, I never added four times the monthly rent to what was owed me. I guess it's possible that it's very expensive to evict folks in Great Britain. As for myself, my property manager usually charged me court costs - not more than a couple of hundred dollars - and that was it. His efforts on my behalf were paid for out of the management fee I paid him monthly.
Any light you can shed on this would be appreciated.
Thanks,
sitetest
Basically, it's a setup to do an end-run around the US Constitution and whatever equivalent protections they have in the UK -- our base spies on British subjects; their base spies on American citizens, they trade the tapes, and nobody has to be accountable to anybody.
Article from the Telegraph and Article from the Metro
The landowner is fighting repossession of his property, so he is desperate to find a way to pay his mortgage. The tenants gave him 30 days notice that they have to move back to the US and they had a dispute the next day. The family is going to pay rent for May, but the landlord want 83,000 for the remander of the lease. I have no idea how he came up with the 12,000 fee.
The move is being paid for by their employer and interference like this makes the move more costly then it should be. Which mean that the moving company take the loss of profit if they can't charge the customer for additional costs.
Also, a fellow Freeper kindly suggested that I should ask for my original comment to be removed for anonymity. I am trying to follow the suggestion and get my first comment removed. Which Mod should I ask to do this?
I did a TDY in Virginia on a Navy contract in 1987 and was getting $1,500/month allowance, tax free, for housing and whatever. I rented a very nice furnished place for about $600, brought my family down and had $900 a month to pocket plus I got a 30% of base pay as a taxable bonus+overtime. Those were the days. People were shaking their heads because the incentive package was the same as the Air Force offered for working in Greenland. We actually preferred Virginia to Massachusetts, but stayed for family reasons.
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