A property investment company owned by the Noe family that annexed a storeroom owned by a neighbour while converting a flat has appealed against a ruling that it must pay almost £600,000 in damages and interest.
Last year, Deputy Judge Geraldine Andrews QC ordered Brookwide to pay for the “cynical expropriation” of neighbour Ausman Ramzan’s Indian restaurant at
Unusually, no 125 included a flying freehold of part of the adjacent no 123, which was used as a storeroom for the restaurant and as a fire escape from an upstairs function room.
When Brookwide converted a flat in no 123, it knocked through expecting to find empty space, and took possession of the storeroom without asking permission from the neighbouring property’s then owner and father of Ausman Ramzan, Mohammed Ramzan, who at the time had been declared bankrupt. Brookwide’s works rendered the fire escape inaccessible and left it hanging off the wall.
Ausman Ramzan bought the premises for £1 from his father’s trustee-in-bankruptcy and sued. However, the judge declined to order the recovery of the property, instead awarding damages for trespass, including exemplary damages for the wrongful and continuing appropriation of the room, plus interest.
Brookwide has asked the Court of Appeal to reduce the £588,257 total because it is more than the property Ausman Ramzan bought for £1 is worth, even including the storeroom.
It says that the judge should not have awarded sums under three heads of damage separately without considering the possibility of overlap and double recovery.
It claims that an award for loss of £24,000 pa profits from the function room, totalling £225,000, was based on figures from 1994-98, prior to Mohammed Ramzan’s bankruptcy, and that it compensates Ausman Razman for loss of business he never had and had never tried to set up. Further, Ausman Ramzan should not have been awarded more than £85,000 to build a replacement fire escape since he had already been compensated for a diminution in value of his property.
It claims that the judge was wrong to add £60,000 in exemplary damages when the amount of compensation was sufficiently punitive, and that she awarded £70,000 too much in interest.
Leslie Blohm QC, for Ausman Razman, said that Brookwide had “behaved throughout like an arrogant bully” and that the judge made an award of damages necessary for it to understand that its behaviour was “intolerable and unacceptable”.