As the hotly anticipated clash between Mark Holyoake and Nick and Christian Candy kicked off at the High Court, extensive documents filed by both sides in the case revealed the full extent of the bitter dispute.
Holyoake is suing the Candy brothers for more than £100m, claiming they “coerced” him out of millions of pounds after they lent him £12m to buy Belgravia Mansion Grosvenor Gardens House.
Meanwhile, the Candy brothers strongly refute the allegations and say that Holyoake was an unreliable creditor who lied to them from the start.
Below are some of the main points detailed in the skeleton arguments of both parties, released by their lawyers this morning:
Holyoake’s claims
• Holyoake took out a loan for £12m with a term of two years and an interest rate of 20%, calculated quarterly. Under the terms of the loan, Holyoake was liable to pay the loan and all the interest for the full term of the loan, even if he paid early. He eventually ended up paying £37m to settle the loan.
• Prior to the repayment of the loan in February 2014, Holyoake alleges he was subjected to a campaign of intimidation from the brothers, coercing him into accepting a serious of one-sided agreements. They included physical and verbal threats against him, his wife and unborn child. They did this, Holyoake alleges, “to obtain the property [Grosvenor Gardens House] at an undervalue…and to extract as much money as possible” from him.
• In an e-mail to Nicholas Candy, Christian Candy suggested subjecting Holyoake to “Bad Boy penalties” and suggested that Christian’s company CPC could gain control of the site “if we are clever”.
• Holyoake alleges Christian Candy’s threats and intimidations included called him a “lying fucking scumbag”, threatening to “destroy [his] world” and use the “nuclear option”. Holyoake’s wife is scheduled to take the witness stand later in the trial to talk about the threats allegedly made against her husband and their family while she was pregnant, and the effect those threats had on family life.
The Candy brothers’ defence
• The Candy brothers’ skeleton argument says that Holyoake has pleaded “myriad” causes of actions, and that his witness statements make a large number of “(progressively escalating) allegations of the most serious kind, relating to not only wrongful but criminal conduct”, which “demand careful and rigorous examination”.
• It says: “The defence takes issue with all of the allegations, and sets out the true version of events which entails serial dishonesty and fraud on the part of Mr Holyoake and his associates… Such dishonesty is evidenced by the claimants’ own disclosure. The defendants’ case is that this was a project developed by Mr Holyoake on dishonest foundations with other people’s money, and pursued dishonestly, throughout.”
• “The allegations of physical threats are nothing short of disgraceful”, it adds. “The real reason they are made is all to obvious. Mr Holyoake has sought to use such claims in Chancery proceedings as a vehicle to pressure the defendants into commercial settlement. He has made fantastic and spiteful allegations in order to vex the Candy brothers in and about their business, professional and personal affairs.”
• “Faced with Mr Holyoake’s repeated broken promises and breaches, most commercial lenders would have foreclosed”, the skeleton says. But the Candy brothers didn’t want to “bring down the house of cards”
• They defendants’ skeleton says that Holyoake was attempting to “use other people’s money” to finance the Belgravia purchase but “keep the the equity upside for himself”. This plan was “propped up by a web of untruths” and he has subsequently “concocted far-fetched and dishonest allegations of a most seriously nature”.
