Dear John, 

I have copied Russell in this email, as he should be aware of the ongoing allegations you are making against him. In the future, if you have personal allegations of criminal conduct to make against Russell, you should raise them with him in the first place. He can decide if and how to respond to them.

If Russell denies those accusations, as he has always done, it is not our role to go beyond that denial. We do not have the necessary powers to conduct an investigation or any right to obtain any information from him. Any attempt to do so would be in breach of his right to privacy. Any investigation into alleged criminal conduct is the exclusive domain of the police. Still less can we act as prosecutors, judge and jury for your allegations. That is for the exclusive jurisdiction of the criminal courts, not for the freeholder of a building at the request of a disgruntled leaseholder's husbandc . 

You have kept repeating the same accusations of drug use and drug dealing for the last three years but have yet to produce a single piece of evidence to support them. Your accusations seem to be based purely on personal conjectures rather than anything else. They have been adopted and amplified by your solicitor as if they were his own and presented as fully substantiated facts in front of the County Court. Yet he has not offered any evidence in support either. 

Your demands that Russell be evicted immediately is without merit. You have not identified a valid legal basis falling within the tightly defined statutory grounds for terminating an assured shorthold tenancy on which you would rely and no evidence to support any such grounds has ever been presented. As your solicitor will be aware, the legal threshold is high and evidence would be heavily scrutinised by the Court before granting an eviction and possession order against someone's main (and only) residence, making them potentially homeless.

  You reported a “strong smell of marijuana” in the common parts twice in the 15 months since I took over management in April 2024, once last November and a second time last week. Both times I arranged for our handyman to attend the property within a short time of your report.  On both occasions our handyman arrived to the flat unannounced quite late in the evening and Russell allowed him to undertake an inspection. In fact, both times he encouraged our handyman to inspect the entire flat thoroughly as he “had nothing to hide” and was keen to dispel these accusations which you have levelled at him for years. 

No trace of cannabis odour or any other evidence of drug use was found on either inspection, suggesting the source of any alleged smell must have been elsewhere, within or outside the building.   

Each visit incurred an out-of-hours charge of £120. We are intending to charge these solely to Flat 5 as a service just for your benefit, rather than debit them to the service charge account more generally. I welcome any comments you may have in that respect before the demands are issued.

Russell has consistently denied these allegations. He has told me last week and you directly on multiple occasions that he does not smoke marijuana or permit others to smoke it in the flat as he does not like the smell either and it lingers for too long. I have no reason to disbelieve him. 

Ironically, on 5 July, upon returning home at 17:49 after being out all afternoon, he also reported to me a strong smell of cannabis in the hallway. CCTV confirms he was not at the property from 13:07 to 17:48 that day. This further suggests the source lay elsewhere. I can offer no suggestion as to whether this may have originated from within the buillding or from the outside.

Since Russell became a tenant over five years ago in 2019, you have made similar allegations on just a handful of occasions, I can count 4 including the two I dealt with since April 2014. They are all denied by him. Over the same period, nobody else in the building has made any complaint about Russell, not even your wife, who lives in the flat permanently. I can find no record of any complaints for anti-social behaviour or any other interference by him with use and enjoyment of the property by other residents.   

The Tribunal has already dismissed all your allegations as unsupported by any evidence in both its substantive and its costs decision. Nothing has changed since then, no evidence has ever been provided. Yet, the same allegations have been repeated and amplified in sworn evidence by Jason, acting as both witness and advocate in the County Court.  

With each allegation you make, whether new or embellished old, it becomes more apparent to me, coming to this as an outsider, that you are conducting a personal crusade against Russell, whom you described years ago by text as a "bad apple" that should be gotten rid of.

This is nothing but an extension of your long-running feud with Mario — a conflict I have done my best to draw a line under since taking over in April last year.  I invite you again to do the same. Unless you are willing to move on from that past conflict and look at the whole picture more objectively, this will just drag on and will continue long after I am gone and the freehold has been transferred to you. 

The most recent suggestion in Jason's submissions to the Court — that your wife and young children (the only teenagers living in the building) had to be "evacuated" and can no longer live at the property due to Russell's presence — is both laughably implausible and demonstrably untrue. The most cursory review of current CCTV footage contradicts it. Nonetheless, it was included in your solicitor's witness statement, misleadingly certified as reflecting true facts and repeated in separate submissions to the Court to substantiate the extreme urgency of the matter. 

Let me be clear: unsupported allegations, however emphatically stated, restated and expanded upon with each retelling, do not become evidence. Their repetition — particularly when it can only be attributed to anonymous sources or derived from speculative assertions — does not amount to proof.  

We will not consider undertaking any new inspections or take any further action based on uncorroborated complaints, invariably made just by you and no one else. If you believe there is a valid cause for concern and can provide specific, credible evidence that would stand up in court and can identify the exact legal basis for any action to terminate Russell’s AST, we will review the position. Until then, we consider this matter closed and any further discussion pointless. 

One final but important comment about your express and direct threats to call the police unless matters are resolved to your satisfaction. You have twice now threatened the freeholder and therefore me as its director with calling the police unless we give in to your demand for the immediate eviction of Russell.  I have no idea of what you are alleging I am doing that would warrant such a threat, but it is bordering on blackmail. The clear implication is that I am involved in some illegal activity you would be reporting to the police. On any view, that is a defamatory remark and will be actioned accordingly should you repeat any similar remark or suggestion of any involvement by me or the company in any criminal activities or even allege knowledge of such activity. I trust that will not be necessary and common sense will prevail. The same goes for Jason, but that will be the subject of a report by Mario to his regulatory body, the SRA, independently of this dispute, as he clearly has not heeded previous warnings and complaints to his firm. 

If you feel that the police should be involved because you believe that one of your neighbours is smoking a joint inside his own flat on at least two occasions in the past 14 months and think this would be worthwhile use of police time, I suggest that you do contact the police rather than the freeholder the next time it happens.

You could perhaps also consider the most obvious way of resolving any doubt about the source of the smell: knocking on Russell’s door when you think this is happening. You would then be most likely to get confirmation either way and voice your concerns face to face if your allegations prove to be founded. 

I trust this sufficiently deals with this ongoing “drugs side show and we may finally put it to rest and concentrate on the real issues at hand. 

Yours sincerely, 

Davy Thielens 

For and on behalf of Tarquin Management Ltd