Property developer Nick Candy told a London court that he doesn’t treat staff and people who work form him badly, saying that people who do “end up in the High Court being sued”.
Entrepreneur Mark Holyoake is suing brothers Nick and Christian Candy for more than £100m, claiming they “coerced” him out of millions of pounds after Christian Candy’s company CPC lent him £12m to buy Belgravia mansion Grosvenor Gardens House in late 2011.
The Candy brothers strongly refute the allegations and say that Holyoake was an unreliable creditor who lied to them from the start. They say that Holyoake’s allegations of coercion are fabricated.
Nick Candy spent his second day on the witness stand on Monday, more than five weeks into the trial, speaking under cross examination from Holyoake’s lawyer, Roger Stewart QC.
Stewart questioned him about the way he treats staff and people who work for him.
Stewart asked Candy about a travel agent who failed to provide his wife’s family with £300,000 worth of air tickets for his wedding.
“Did you threaten to ‘call the boys round’ to [the travel agent’s] house?” he said.
“No, I did not,” Candy replied. Candy said he did threaten to call the police, saying the agent was an associate of a fraudster currently in gaol.
“There was no connection,” between the agents, Stewart said. “You just decided to humiliate this poor travel agent.”
Stewart put it to him that he treats staff at his company Candy & Candy “very badly”.
“Candy & Candy is a brilliant environment to work in,” Candy said. While his language can be “colourful”, he denied speaking badly to staff.
If you treat staff badly, “you end up in the High Court getting sued”, he said.
He described as “absolutely disgusting” the allegation that he sacked an employee with MS “on the spot”.
Nick Candy said the former employee is still a great friend of his. He said he recently promised to pass on some songs that the former employee had written to Simon Cowell, who is also a friend.
He also denied being instrumental in the failure of music social media company Crowdmix, which went into administration last year. Candy said he has invested around £10m in the company.
He said the board of the company approved the company’s insolvency. “I don’t control the board,” he said.
Giving evidence earlier in the case, Holyoake said that he approached Nick Candy, a university friend, for an unsecured loan to help him with a property transaction.
He alleges that soon after the loan was provided by Christian Candy’s company, he subjected him to a campaign of threats and intimidation with the intention of “stealing the asset” and getting as much money out of him as possible.
He alleges that Christian Candy told him he would deliberately engineer a situation that would put Holyoake’s then pregnant wife Emma, who had previously suffered a miscarriage, under extreme stress.
Earlier in the trial, both Nick and Christian Candy vociferously denied this allegation, with Nick Candy saying it made him feel “absolutely sick”.
