Diaz v Karim

This is a claim brought by Guevara Raul Diaz, a German citizen of Angolan origin. His claim is brought in trespass to goods and land, against his landlord, Mr Mohammed Karim. The claimant acts in person; Mr Karim is represented by Mr Charles Mannan of counsel.

The claimant told me that he obtained a PhD degree from Hamburg University in 2009. He is now in his early 40s. His evidence is that he is currently a Fellow at the Centre for Commercial Law at Queen Mary, University of London, and a visiting academic at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University. In 2015-2016 he was also taking a teacher training course at the University of Westminster. He told me that he is a political scientist with remarkably wide-ranging interests across political thought, law and history. His PhD thesis was on the political history of Pharaonic Africa, or Azania, as he called it. He told me that he also has interests in the development of the European mind. Unfortunately, he has never held a salaried academic post. He has taken a series of degrees, no doubt in part with the help of loans such as that afforded to him by the German state when he worked on his PhD between 2006 and 2009. He has no private means. His last salaried job was in sales in 2010. Until June 2015, at least, he received Job Seeker’s Allowance and Housing Benefit. I note that the court fee was remitted when he issued the claim form in this action. He seems to support himself primarily by helping students, for payment, to write their dissertations. His evidence was that he gives advice on the structure and approach to be adopted, rather than on the actual composition of their work, which would, he said, offend against academic integrity. He told me that he has also been supported by a series of loans from friends and family. It was unclear to me, and he did not explain, how or when he is likely to be able to repay his creditors.

Given the claimant’s evidence about his current attachment to a university department of commercial law, it might have been expected that he would have had some grasp of the practice of English law, or an ability to focus on the pleaded issues. Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case. His trial bundle had not been not agreed with the defendant, despite an order of the court that it should be; it contained a great deal that was of no relevance and omitted some material (for example, the Defence) which was highly relevant; he kept producing undisclosed documents in the course of the trial, and did so without bringing photocopies for the benefit of the court, the defendant’s counsel or the witness to whom he intended to put them; and he told me contentedly on the first day of trial, a Monday, that his witnesses would be coming on the Wednesday. At that stage I had hoped that the trial would have finished within two days, so I urged him to ensure their attendance sooner. In the event I was still waiting for one of his witnesses to turn up at court after 4.30pm on the Wednesday, even after the public entrance to the Royal Courts of Justice had closed. It was clear that the witness would not have arrived until well after 5pm, if at all. I had already allowed the claimant very substantial latitude in the scope and length of his cross-examination, which took many times longer than had been necessary, and I was not prepared to allow the trial to stretch into a fourth day, with all the wasted costs and court time that would have been involved. His lack of grasp of the court process was amply illustrated by his suggestion on more than one occasion that I should simply speak to the witness on his mobile telephone.

Since 1 June 2014 the claimant has been the defendant’s tenant at 114 Sedgmoor Place, Camberwell, London SE5, a house with several other tenants, each of whom appears to have a bedroom and shared facilities. The defendant is a minicab driver. He owns and used to live at 114 Sedgmoor Place himself with his family, including his brother, a Mr M Rahman.

The defendant has long been in dispute with the claimant about what he says are very substantial arrears of rent, and has since 2015 been attempting to obtain a possession order against him in the Lambeth County Court. It is quite clear that this claim should long ago have been transferred to the Lambeth County Court and ordered to be tried with the possession claim. There were substantial areas of evidential overlap between the two cases, although the core issues are different.

The claim is for damages for trespass to goods and land. The essence of the claim is that the claimant maintains that on 3 September 2015, when he was out, the defendant came to his room and disposed of all his possessions, many of which were very valuable. The claim is denied in its entirety.

The claim form, issued on 2 October 2015, states the claimant’s expectation that he will recover more than £900,000 but not more than £1 million in damages. The claim form is endorsed with particulars of the claim. I shall not set out the original particulars of claim here, because the claimant updated them on 4 May 2016. He did so without permission, by the simple expedient of filling in a new claim form, not issued by the court, and attaching to it new particulars, which elaborated on the original. However, Mr Mannan was content for the elaborated particulars to be treated as the basis of the claim, because they did not contain any addition of substance to the claim as originally pleaded.

I set out the particulars of claim verbatim in their amended form, omitting one paragraph containing the claimant’s explanation that they represent an updated version of his original schedule of loss and damage:

‘There was a burglary in my home/house on the 3^rd of September 2015 resulting in the loss of both my valuable and invaluable possessions. The locks to the main/front door of the house as well as that of my own room were also changed on that day. I learnt later from the other tenants that the defendant was in the house on that date and gave the other tenants keys to the back door; and he also advised them that he would give them the keys of the main/ front door on a later date, which he did on the 10^th of September 2015. He also told the other tenants on the 3^rd September 2015 that he had literally locked me out of his house, and has taken all my valuable possessions with him (supposedly to the street). He then advised the other tenants not to communicate with me in any form nor respond to my calls. However, one of the tenants with whom the defendant had spoken to on that day, Mr Mohammed Mubeem refused to abide by the landlord’s advice and informed me immediately about that unlawful act. While at work, I called the Metropolitan police to the scene, who attended the call some few minutes later only to realise that the defendant had already left the premises with all my goods. The Metropolitan police and the Southwark Council have both established that the Mr Mohammed Fazful Karim had unlawful attempted to evict me from the house illegally; and that the trespass to my goods … amounts to a theft.

‘Schedule of Loss and Damages

‘The table below contains information about the list of things, or goods, that the defendant trespassed on my land on the 3^rd of September 2015. The trespassed goods, both valuable and invaluable, and/or evidential facts are listed in chronological order (A-E) as in the original claim form that was issued on the 2^nd of October 2015, with some minor grammatical improvement of the language of the original form.

A black leather bag, whose locks were forcefully broken and all its contents trespassed/stolen. These include, inter alia, a blue Toshiba Laptop/notebook, mark: SATELLITE 1100-Z14, which I purchased in Greifswald, Germany, on the 24 December 2001 with the purchase number 9124/117/00028 at the official market price of 1399.00 euro in Greifswald (Germany) and which contained, among other things, fifteen years of my academic and political research materials and (unpublished) works; a 250 GB external hard drive (an extension of the notebook’s data; a pack of 12 CDs with invaluable academic and political research data/information) the total value of which is estimated at about £450,000.

A black medium-size travel bag that contained, inter alia, very important documents (e.g. the original copies of my doctoral, masters and undergraduate degrees/diplomas/certificates and transcripts from the universities of Hamburg, Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich, Potsdam, Greifswald, London, and Oslo (Norway); my German travel document/passport; a new mini notebook, which I bought in Germany for about £800 and which contained important academic and political information/data; an official file of the Azanian National Union (ANU), which contained invaluable documents such as ANU official correspondence with foreign governments, including sensitive data such as members information et cetera. In addition, the other important and invaluable cultural and political materials/documents, which the defendant had trespassed on the 3^rd of September 2015 and which are generally critical for my ongoing research on Europe, are Heinrich Kramer, James Sprenger (1487). Malleus Maleficarum. Spreyer, Germany; John Wycliff (1383/85). English Bible; Arthur J. Droge (1989). Homer or Moses? … Tuebingen, Germany; Peter Pilhofer (1990). Presbyteron Kreitton: Der Altbeweis der Juedischen und Christlichen Apologeten und seine Vorgesichte … Tuebingen, Germany; Northrop Frye (2006). Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays…; Lutz, Doering (2012). Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginning of Christian Epistography… Tuebingen, etc; my personal album which contained pictures from the early 1990s and earlier; the latest model of a blue berry, which I purchased for £500.00; and a professional canon Camera at the value of £1500.00. The damages sued for these items are about £250,000.00.

Other important cultural and political documents include an official Emblem of the Azanian nation, the flag of the Azanian national union (ANU); and a GRUNDIG World Receiver (Yacht Boy 500) which I bought for 500.00 euro in 1995/6 but which is now a classic and cost about £3000.00 (I should note that these three items noted in this part of section C were secretly brought back by the defendant in the night of 7^th September 2015 (albeit some damages to the GRUNDIG) and left in front of the 114 Sedgmoor Place, London SE5 7SE, after we had reached an agreement on the 5^th and 6^th of September 2015 with the agent defendant called Hussein Hassan, a British-Pakistani national, to discuss/negotiate an out-of-court settlement on the 8^th of September 2015); a file that contained a number of important IDs from the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as some very important document related to my current research in the UK; the official stamp of the Azanian national union (ANU/NAU), and three Emerald gemstones (black, green and yellow) which symbolise the national Flag of the Azanian nation and was brought from Angola. The damages I am suing for these cultural relevant goods are at about £250,000.00.

Five pairs of trousers, five shirts and three winter pullovers, and three pair of shoes; an electric iron (the iron was later returned in the night of the 7^th September 2015 together with some of the items noted in section C above); a brand-new shaving machine; and my bedsheets, all of which are estimated at about £2000.00.

Further losses and damages for which I am suing the Defendant is a sum of £6500.00 in cash, which I had originally saved for my Visiting Academic Fellowship position at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge (September 2015 to August 2016), that was in one of the rare books the defendant trespassed on the 3^rd of September 2015. In addition, I am suing the defendant for the time and resources I have so far used on this High Court case pursuing the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), as well as other law enforcement agencies and institutions (e.g. law firms etc) from the 3^rd of September until the 2^nd of October 2015 - these latter damages also include the psychological damages suffered as a result of the defendant’s unlawful actions on the 3^rd of September 2015, as well as the loss of my academic research position at the University of Cambridge at about £50,000.00.

‘Thus I, Claimant, am suing the Defendant in the pending High Court Case (HQ15X04138) for the total sum of about £1000,000.00 for unlawfully trespassing my land and goods on the 3^rd of September 2015. The Claimant’s claims for damages and interests of damages and/or the return of the goods trespassed are made pursuant to 35A of the Senior Court Act 1981.’

The claimant entered into a tenancy agreement with the defendant on 26 May 2014, for a six month assured shorthold tenancy of 114 Sedgmoor Place, Camberwell, London SE5 7SE, beginning on 1 June 2014, at a monthly rental of £400 payable in advance, together with a deposit of £400.

The claimant had a number of fixed beliefs about the defendant, one of which was that an almost identical version of his own copy of the tenancy agreement was a forgery for which the defendant was responsible. Its terms were no different from the version in his own possession, and he does not seem to have asked himself why anyone should take the trouble of forging an agreement in terms identical to those of the supposedly genuine version. It was clear to me from the evidence of Mahfuz Karim, the defendant’s son, who had acted for his father in meeting the claimant on 26 May and handing over the tenancy agreement and house keys, that the version regarded by the claimant as a forgery was simply the version retained by the landlord.

According to the defendant, the claimant was always in arrears with his rent. Since the issue of arrears had some bearing on the relations between the parties and had the potential to cast some light on the events of 3 September 2015, it was explored in evidence. The claimant was cross-examined about his rental payments. It appeared from his bank statements with the Co-operative Bank that the rental payments which he had made through his bank had amounted to £1107. Those payments, to one M Rahman, were made between 1 July and 3 November 2014. He agreed that was the extent of the rent payments that he made through his bank. His explanation for that related to the defendant’s addresses. The claimant was concerned, as I understood him, that the defendant had a different address on the tenancy agreement from the address on his bank account. It was another of the claimant’s preoccupaations about the defendant that he was, so the claimant believed, in the habit of concealing, or at any rate of not stating correctly, his true address. The claimant said that he stopped paying through his bank because the defendant’s address was wrongly stated on the tenancy agreement. Pressed on why that should have caused him to abandon a secure method of payment for an insecure one, he maintained that he had problems with security, so he paid ‘by hand’ instead. In other words, he paid by cash. He had hoped to confirm that by the evidence of his intended witness Mr Mubeen, to whom, he said, he had given his rent on several occasions to be passed on to the defendant, at the defendant’s request. He produced receipts for the sums which he paid in cash. The difficulty with them was that they were receipts signed by him, not by the defendant, so they did not take matters very much further.

The defendant’s evidence was that the claimant did not make one single payment by cash: indeed, the defendant did not accept cash payments. Moreover, the sums paid through the bank were the only payments that the claimant ever made, with the exception of £100 paid on 15 August 2015 on the claimant’s behalf by another tenant, Mr Mubeen.

I prefer not to make any finding about the amount of rent arrears, because it is not necessary for this judgment that I should do so, and because I do not want to complicate the task of the judge determining the issue in the Lambeth County Court, which is the forum best equipped to determine it. It is sufficient for present purposes to record that it is the defendant’s position that the claimant owes him many thousands of pounds in rent. The claimant maintains that he has paid very much more than the defendant allows, but does admit that he paid a substantially reduced rent in 2015 and 2016 to reflect what he says were failures of provision by the defendant of such facilities as a fridge and internet access. Even on his own evidence, therefore, there are and long have been substantial arrears of rent.

It was another of the claimant’s fixed beliefs about the defendant that he used the pseudonym of M. Rahman. There was no evidence that he had done so, except to the extent that the payee of the few rental payments which the claimant made through his bank was one M. Rahman. I should record also that a Mr Abu Jalloh was belatedly interposed during the defendant’s case to give evidence for the claimant. He had almost nothing of relevance to contribute, but he did say that he believed the defendant was called Mohammed Rahman. That was because the defendant said he was called Mohammed (as indeed he was) and because the payee on the bank account to which he paid his rent was M Rahman. The defendant explained, and I saw no reason not to accept his evidence on this point, that Mujizur Rahman was his brother. I was unable to understand his explanation as to why the rent money was paid into his brother’s account. It appears not to matter.

According to the defendant, on 30 September 2014 he served on the claimant a notice under s21, Housing Act 1988, to quit the premises by 30 November 2014, when, as he understood it, the tenancy would have come to an end. In fact, it would not have come to an end until 31 December 2014. He did so, as I understood him, because of the arrears of rent. According to the defendant, the claimant refused to sign it. The claimant denied having been given it at all, but in cross-examination appeared to accept that he had been given it, but had refused to sign. Asked by the claimant why, if he had served a notice to quit, he did not enforce it by seeking an order for possession, the defendant not unreasonably said that he wanted to avoid court proceedings if he could, because they were expensive, and because the claimant kept making excuses for non-payment of the rent and promised that it would be paid. The claimant had told him that he had a new job which would enable him to pay. The defendant said that he trusted him. In that context I should record that it was the evidence of the defendant’s son Mahfuz, a straightforward and apparently candid young man whose evidence I had no difficulty in accepting, that he had been to the house on a number of occasions with his father, mainly to try to obtain rent payments from the claimant, who would make excuses for non-payment. It seems to be common ground that whether or not he was given an extension of his tenancy (as he insists he was, and the defendant says he was not), the claimant did in fact remain in possession of the property. Indeed, he remains there to this day.

Another fixed belief of the claimant, which he wished to investigate at length in cross-examination, was that his contacts with Southwark Council about his liability to pay council tax had caused the defendant embarrassment and irritation. This was a very tangential matter which had no direct relevance to the alleged events of 3 September 2015, and I was not prepared to allow the claimant to spend as long on it as he would probably have wished. The claimant seems to have believed that the defendant wished to conceal information about the occupancy of the building from the Council, and asked him not to tell the council the names of the other tenants. But, he told me, on 17 June 2015 the Council asked him to stay at home so that they could visit him and inspect the property.

The claimant produced photographs of the screen of a mobile phone which were said to show text messages passing between him and the defendant, whom he insisted on addressing as ‘Rahman’. There was no indication on any of the photographed messages to whom or from whom they had been sent, except that each image bore the words ‘Raul Diaz gff’ and the date. In one text, dated 18 June 2015, he claimed to have sent this message to the defendant: ‘Dear Rahman, please could you clarify the situation of your house with southwark council: they want me to stay at home so that they would come and inspect my – house! They still think I am the owner/landlord of your house’. What he said was the reply from the defendant the same day – it bore no indication that it came from the defendant or any particular mobile number – read as follows: ‘I contracted (sic) the council last week and started paying council tax. I sorted out. I made council tax direct debit to my account. Call me urgently tomorrow morning. You created trouble’. Again on 18 June there was this message: ‘Anyone call you say move out. Tell other not to open door. Do not open the door for anyone. Do not take phone call or appointment from anyone. Anyone call you...’ Another, dated 19 June 2015, read ‘Hi, you haven’t been answering my phone calls. You have created a serious problem for me and also you have a bad history of payment rent on time. I can’t have you as a tenant no more. So I’m giving you until the end of this month to leave the property. If you don’t leave, enforcement team to remove your stuff from the premises and also change the locks’ (sic). The defendant denied having received or sent any of these supposed messages.

At the very least there seems to have been some misunderstanding over liability for council tax, possibly in part as a result of the claimant making direct contact with the council and being treated as the person responsible for payment for the property. The terms of the tenancy agreement obliged the tenants to discharge their own liability for council tax, but the defendant told me that he had continued to pay council tax for the building as a whole after he stopped living there himself, and had not bothered to collect the amounts individually due from his tenants. He produced his council tax bill dated 29 June 2015, which showed that he had been responsible for payment of council tax to Southwark Council in respect of 114 Sedgmoor Place since at least 1 June 2014. On the face of it, there seems to have been no difficulty.

It is not necessary for me to make any finding of fact as to the question of liability for council tax. I am certainly not in a position to conclude, as the claimant would have me do, that the defendant was dishonestly concealing some impropriety from the council and for that reason was determined to get rid of the claimant as a tenant. It is quite clear to me in any event, on the basis of the evidence of Mahfuz Karim as well as that of his father, and on the basis of the claimant’s own admissions about his rental payments, that – to put the matter at the lowest – the claimant was not an ideal tenant. The defendant himself accepted in evidence that since the autumn of 2014 he had wanted the claimant out of the property.

It was the claimant’s evidence that after the exchanges in June 2015 the defendant began to negotiate with him amicably, asking him when he intended to leave, and yet that at the same time the defendant adopted the ‘vile strategy to terrify us constant nuisance’, as his witness statement put it, which appears to have been a matter of visiting the property unannounced and asking the tenants to vacate. He said that he told the defendant at some point (it was not clear when) that he would be going to Cambridge at the end of September 2015, but wanted to keep the room because he could not take all his books with him. The defendant, he said, was happy with that as long as he paid the rent, but told him not to tell the other tenants that he would be leaving his possessions in his room. It is unclear why the defendant would have made that stipulation. The defendant insists that there was no suggestion that he would keep his room.

The defendant’s account was that on 8 June 2015 the claimant told him he would vacate the room by the end of July to relocate to Cambridge, and would pay the outstanding arrears before he left. He produced a photocopy of what he said was a text message dated 8 June 2015 from the claimant to that effect, addressed to ‘Dear Rahman’, although the claimant denied having sent it. The defendant visited the property on 26 July, and found the claimant’s door wide open and the room empty. The claimant’s keys were on the table in the living room. He was told by a female Polish tenant that the claimant had left. He tried to ring the claimant but got no answer. The claimant says that he received no calls. On 15 August the defendant visited the house with a prospective tenant, who found some old clothes in the wardrobe. The defendant put them in a black dustbin liner and left them in the living room. On that occasion, even though his prospective tenant did not in the event take the room, in accordance with his usual practice when there was a change of tenants, he changed the front door lock. He was cross-examined by the claimant about paragraph 13 of his Particulars of Claim in the Lambeth possession action, where it was pleaded that he realised on 15 August that the claimant had returned to the house. In fact, the defendant told me, he did not realise that until later.

The reference to a move to Cambridge was to the claimant’s application to the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in Cranmer Road, Cambridge, which accepts academic visitors (known as Visiting Fellows) to carry out independent research using the Centre’s facilities. The claimant had applied to visit the Centre, and was notified of the acceptance of his application by email dated 31 July 2016 from the Administrator. All visitors had to fund their own stay in Cambridge. The proposed dates of his visit were from 29 September 2015 to 16 September 2016. The claimant maintains that (as does appear to be the case) he did not know that his application had been accepted until 31 July 2015, and that even then the planned arrival date was 29 September, so he would hardly have told the defendant in June that he would be leaving for Cambridge by the end of July.

According to the claimant, there were incidents of harassment in the course of the summer. He claimed that late July and early August, the defendant brought a man called Hussein Hassan, said to be his letting agent for 114 Sedgmoor Place, to view the claimant’s room, after which he claimed to have misplaced the keys. The defendant denied that he brought Mr Hassan to view the room. On 28 August, according to the claimant’s evidence, the defendant appeared with two other Asian men and harassed and threatened him. That also was denied by the defendant.

In the event, it became clear that the claimant had not moved out. The claimant said that he never left, and that his room was never empty, but the defendant maintains that he must have moved back in again, presumably by gaining access through the rear kitchen door, where the key was left inside the lock for fire safety reasons. Moreover, on the defendant’s account, the claimant and his fellow tenant Mr Mubeen (who had promised to move out by the end of August) changed the front door lock, thus preventing the defendant from gaining access. The defendant insists that he was unable to get into the property from some point in the second half of August 2015 until 14 December 2016. The claimant denies that the locks were changed.

The fog of allegation and counter-allegation was not clarified by a curious coda to the lock-changing allegations. During the first day of trial the defendant produced a document described as a witness statement, signed by him. Dated 13 February 2017, written in very poor English, not apparently drafted by lawyers, it exhibited (inter alia) a document itself headed ‘Witness statement’, which stated ‘This is to confirm that we. Mr Muhammed Mubben (sic) and Mr Raul Guevara Diaz’ (with their signatures apparently added) ‘currently living at 114 Sedgmoor Place, Camberwell, London SE5 7SE. Today 14^th Dec 2016 the main entrance door’s lock of the property has replaced which we (Mr Mubeen & Mr Diaz) agreed and new keys provided to us. Because since August 2015 we had changed the front door’s lock and did not provide any copy of the key to the landlord to enter into the property. The above statements are true and best of the knowledge. Thank you.’ The names of the two men, their apparent signatures and the date of 14 December 2016 appeared below, the whole apparently witnessed by Mr M Rahman and Mahfuz Karim, the defendant’s son. The names of three ‘Independent eye witnesses’ are also appended, all of them enforcement officers from Southwark Council. The claimant accepts that the locks were changed on that day and that the officers were present: they had made an appointment to inspect the house. The defendant gave him and the other tenants new keys, and the claimant signed a document to confirm his receipt of them. But he says that he never signed the 14 December 2016 document which the defendant has produced. It is unclear why he should have agreed to do so. But the document was peripheral and produced at the eleventh hour, and I place no reliance on it.

According to the claimant, the defendant came to the property on 1 September 2015 with s21 notices to the tenants to quit. The defendant denies having done so. The claimant included the notice in his bundle. It is blank, not filled in with the tenant’s or the landlord’s names: the only writing on it is the claimant’s, with his signature, the date of 30 September as the date after which possession is required, and the date of the document, which the claimant wrote in as 2 September 2015. On its face, it is not a s21 notice from the defendant. The claimant says on the one hand that he signed it because there was pressure on him to do so, yet on the other hand he says that he told the other tenants not to sign if they did not want to leave – as (on his own evidence) he himself did not. He also said that it was a ‘pretend document’ to fool the other tenants. It is unclear to me how a completely blank s21 notice to quit could have ‘fooled’ anyone, and there is no reason that I can see why the claimant should have signed it. I should add that the claimant’s witness Mr Afrim Beqiri told the court that he was given a written (not a blank) s21 notice to quit by the defendant on 1 September, which he signed, and in due course he moved out of the house.

In short, at almost every point the claimant’s and defendant’s accounts of what happened in the autumn of 2015 were widely divergent. For present purposes it does not matter greatly which version is correct, or if the truth lies somewhere between, because on both accounts there were acute tensions in the relationship between landlord and tenant. Neither the claimant nor the defendant was a satisfactory witness. Each was consumed with dislike for the other; each was angry and excitable; and neither seemed to me to be committed to giving a calm or balanced account of events to the court. It was difficult to give credence to the evidence of either man. Each of them gave evidence which was implausible. It is implausible, for example, that the claimant should have told the defendant in June that he would be leaving the room for Cambridge in July, given that he did not even know that his application had been accepted until 31 July, and he was not due to go there until late September. It is equally implausible that (as the defendant maintained) the claimant would have emptied his room in July or August 2015, when he had not in fact left London for Cambridge. But the claimant’s evidence is in important respects similarly improbable. It is unlikely, for example, that he told the defendant that he wanted to keep his room beyond the end of September as a place to leave his books, and still less likely that the defendant would have welcomed the proposal. Even on the claimant’s own account, all his books and documents were in two black bags, so there could have been no reason why he should not have been able to take them with him to Cambridge; equally, it is highly implausible that he could have afforded to pay for the room at the same time as supporting himself in Cambridge. The so-called s21 notice to quit, which the claimant says the defendant served on him on 1 September 2015, is on the face of it nothing of the kind. Yet I find it also thoroughly implausible that the defendant would have submitted to being locked out of his own property by his tenants for 16 months, especially when the claimant, on the defendant’s account, was not even paying his rent. In short, I find each of the parties a thoroughly unreliable witness.

All that I can say with any confidence about events preceding 3 September 2015, and perhaps all that I need to say, is that the claimant felt that he was being harassed to leave 114 Sedgmoor Place; and that the defendant was very eager to see the back of him.

The claimant’s evidence was that on 3 September 2015 he was pursuing academic research at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies in Russell Square. He was telephoned by his fellow tenant Mr Mubeen at around 5.10pm to say that the defendant had changed the locks of the front and back doors and of the claimant’s own room, and had left his duvet and some of his possessions outside in front of the house. The claimant called the police immediately. He says that he set out at once for home but had to rely on buses, which were very slow. He reached the house after 7pm. He could not get in, but saw a box of photocopies at the front, and some clothes, sandals and his duvet in what he called the ‘waste area’ at the front of the house. The police arrived later and asked the other tenants to let him in through the back door. His key would not open the door of his room. The claimant tried to call the defendant that evening but he would not answer, and he eventually slept on a couch in the living room. He produced photographs of the screen of a mobile phone showing text messages allegedly sent by him to the defendant. One, timed and dated 2107 on 3 September 2015 and addressed to ‘Landlord Rahman’, says ‘Dear Rahman, I realised that you have thrown my things outside the (contrary to the possession order you gave each tenant to sign). It is lamentable you took such an unreasonable decision’. Another, apparently sent at 0057 on 4 September, reads ‘Dear Rahman, the police have ordered me to get back into the house. They have asked me-to access my room as well. I will paste a copy of the police note that authorises me to access the property and my room-on-my-door. All this was done in front the other tenants, who had to allow the police to repossess my room. I am suing you for the losses that you incurred me as a result of you dumping my valuable belongings on the street knowing very well that they would actually be stolen. Since I wasn’t there and cannot establish who stole my valuables, you would be answerable for everything that I cannot account for as result of your action. So, please open my door immediately as all the doors and windows. You can only possess the house after a court order.’

It does appear that the claimant did indeed call the police on 3 September. He produced hitherto undisclosed documents, some of which he had apparently obtained from the Metropolitan Police by a subject access request under the Data Protection Act 1998, and others (it was not clear which) by a disclosure order obtained in the course of the Lambeth County Court proceedings. Mr Mannan did not take any point on the claimant’s failure to disclose the police documents in these proceedings, nor on what may well have been a breach by the claimant of CPR 31.22, so I agreed to look at them. Those documents contain a reference to the police having been called on 3 September.

The claimant called a young man called Afrim Beqiri to give evidence. His witness statement had plainly been drafted for him by the claimant. (One of the many difficulties of this litigation, in which both parties seem to have represented themselves until – at least in the defendant’s case – a late stage of the proceedings, was that each litigant seems to have drafted the statements of his own intended witnesses. This had the consequence that some caution was required before accepting the truth of evidence which should have stood (and formally did stand) as evidence in chief. Indeed, the claimant put before the court not only the actual statement of Mr Beqiri but also an unsigned and undated document purporting to be a witness statement by Mr Beqiri which Mr Beqiri told me he had never seen before). So far as material, Mr Beqiri’s statement recorded that on 3 September 2015 Mr Mohammed Rahman (sic) gave him new keys for his room and for the back door of the house, asking him to use the back door until the front door lock could be changed. The statement also said that Mr Rahman told him that he had locked the claimant and his things out of the property.

In oral evidence, Mr Beqiri accepted that his statement had been drafted by the claimant, but said he agreed with it so signed and dated it (on 30 December 2015) and returned it to him, keeping a copy for himself. It was apparent that by ‘Mohammed Rahman’, the name which the claimant insisted on using for his landlord, Mr Beqiri meant the defendant. He said that at about 4 or 5pm on 3 September he met the defendant at the front of the house. The defendant had called him about 20 minutes earlier and asked him to meet him there. The defendant told him that he had changed the locks, and gave him two keys, asking him to enter through the back door until he provided new locks for the front door. The defendant also told him that he had locked the claimant out. Mr Beqiri could see the claimant’s possessions, or what the defendant told him were the claimant’s possessions, in front of the house, partially blocking the entrance, and at the back of the building. There were books and documents and clothes and bags. He could not use the front door so tried to look after them by keeping a watch out of the window. He was not ‘authorised’, he said, to bring them inside. The police came that evening. He thought that he first noticed that the claimant’s possessions had gone when he returned from work on 4 September. Mr Beqiri was asked how he could have been so sure that this happened on 3 September 2015. He replied that the defendant’s behaviour had been outrageous and he was 100% sure that it had happened as he described. He remembered it because it was something that did not happen every day. He had a good memory for dates, and did not need prompting.

The defendant’s evidence was that he worked as a minicab driver. He had worked on 3 September 2015 from after lunch until midnight or 1am. He believed that he had been working in the Heathrow area. He denied having been to 114 Sedgmoor Place on 3 September 2015. He said that he had not been in the claimant’s room and did not recall seeing his laptop or books or documents. He did not remove the claimant’s goods and he did not meet Mr Beqiri or have the conversation which Mr Beqiri described. He did not receive the text messages which the claimant said he had sent him.

There was a meeting between the claimant and the defendant on 8 September. The claimant had not by then got into his room, even though he was worried by what might have happened to his possessions. On the evening of 7 September he returned to the house to find some more clothes in front of the house, together with the flag of Azania and his Grundig radio. He assumed that the defendant had returned them. When he and the defendant met on 8 September – as both parties agree they did – the defendant said he did not realise that unauthorised eviction, and dumping a tenant’s belongings in the street, was (as the claimant insisted it was) a criminal offence. The defendant said that there was indeed a meeting, but there was no mention on that occasion of the loss of the claimant’s belongings. In all the circumstances, I find that impossible to accept. He said that he told the claimant and Mr Mubeen he would accept half of the rent arrears if the claimant would move out in 2 weeks, but they did not agree.

The police documents produced by the claimant seem to show that after the initial contact on 3 September, the claimant complained to the police again on 9 September by telephone. At some point – it is unclear when – the lost goods were recorded as being a computer valued at £400, another computer valued at £100, a radio valued at £50, a case valued at £200, a computer valued at £300, photographic equipment valued at £1500, an ANU flag, audio/radio/hi-fi/CD equipment valued at £500, UK and German ID documentation, 3 emerald gemstones valued at £250,000, menswear valued at £1000, and miscellaneous household items such as an iron and a ‘shaving machine’ valued at £200.

The claimant and defendant agreed to meet again on 13 September. According to the claimant, the defendant brought two pieces of paper: one was a schedule of rent arrears (the defendant confirmed that he had brought that schedule), and the other was a document which the defendant insisted in evidence was not his. In somewhat idiosynchratic English it stated that the landlord and tenants had agreed that the landlord would withdraw ‘all of his legal procedures and claims against all tenants from today with his own cost and in the future he cannot raise this matter again’, that the tenants would do likewise, and that the tenants would move out of the house on a date to be specified. The defendant said that this document made no sense because there were no proceedings, whether by him or against him. That was strictly true, although he plainly had a claim for rent arrears, as evidenced by the schedule which he had brought to the meeting, and he knew (certainly by 13 September, and earlier if the claimant is to be believed) that the claimant was upset about the loss of his possessions and was threatening a claim against him. It probably does not matter whether he brought the document to the meeting or not, because it is common ground that there was discussion about a settlement. The claimant’s evidence was that the defendant said he owed him £5193 by way of rent arrears (as his schedule suggests) but would drop his claim if he accepted the proposed agreement. He did not, however, admit removing any of the claimant’s property. The defendant’s evidence was that the claimant did indeed complain to him on 13 September that his goods had been taken, said that he had gone to the police, and threatened a claim for £1 million. A Mr Abu Chowdhury, called by the defendant, gave evidence that he had attended the 13 September meeting, together with Mr Hussein Hassan. The purpose of the meeting had been to negotiate about rent arrears, on which the defendant had been prepared to offer a discount. The claimant had threatened to take the defendant to court for taking his goods.

According to the claimant, it was not until 14 September that he forced access to his room by (as is common ground) cutting away part of the door frame, and found that all his possessions had gone. If that is right, it must have been then that he told the police what he had lost.

The claimant gave lengthy evidence about what he had lost, confirming the loss of all the items described in his schedule of loss and damage. None of his belongings had been insured. Among the books which had disappeared were a first edition of the well-known late fifteenth century work on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum, in very good condition. There were, he said, only four copies of that edition known to exist. He had bought it from a Hamburg rare book dealer in an open market in 2007 or 2008 for about 10,000 Euros. He had been told that its value was between $25,000 and $110,000, depending on its condition.

Even more importantly, he had lost an original Wycliffe Bible (the translation of the Bible into Middle English by John Wycliffe) dating from 1383. He had bought it from the same Hamburg dealer for between 12,000 and 15,000 Euros. He had since been told, he said, that its value was around $1.65 million. His receipts for the books had been in one of his bags that was taken away.

He described some of the other items that had been taken. His Toshiba Satellite laptop had historical value, he claimed, and would now be worth some 10,000 Euros. A ‘mini notebook’ which he bought in Germany for about £800 would now be worth up to £4000, because ‘the older they are the more expensive they are’. He valued the three emerald gemstones, together with some other less valuable items, at £250,000. He confirmed the values which he had put on the goods in his schedule of loss and damage, which, he conceded, were ‘approximate’. He was very concerned at the loss of his research materials, which he valued, together with the Toshiba laptop computer, at come £450,000, which he conceded was ‘approximate’. He had also lost £6500 in cash, £5000 of which he had been going to use to pay the Lauterpacht Centre in order to spend the academic year there. This was money that he had earned by helping students with their work. Asked why he was keeping the money in cash, he said that he did not have time to go to the bank to pay the cash in, and he was sure that the Centre would have happily accepted £5000 in cash. He claimed that he lost his Cambridge position because he was unable to pay in time, although a businesswoman had, he claimed, offered to lend him £10,000. He was sure that he would have got a job had he taken the Cambridge opening.

No witness saw the defendant enter the claimant’s room on 3 September 2015, change the locks and remove his possessions. Nonetheless, that he was responsible for doing so is a conclusion which can properly be drawn from Afrim Beqiri’s evidence of his meeting and conversation with the defendant on 3 September 2015, and of the quantities of possessions piled up outside the front of the house. I found his evidence convincing. Mr Beqiri had left 114 Sedgmoor Road in September 2015, and he had no obvious motive for giving false evidence. It was suggested to him by Mr Mannan that he had been upset enough about his treatment at the hands of the defendant to come to court to support the claimant nearly 18 months later. His response, stated with feeling, was that he had not wanted to come to court, it was not his business, and he regarded it was a waste of time. I saw no reason to doubt the truth or accuracy of his account. He was a much more credible witness than the defendant, whose denial of responsibility I reject.

Moreover, it appeared to me from the Metropolitan Police documents produced by the claimant that the claimant did indeed call the police on the evening of 3 September, and had followed that call up 6 days later. No other reason has been suggested for his calling the police other than that his room had been entered by someone and his goods removed.

However, I do not for one moment accept the claimant’s account of what he lost, or of its value. The proposition that I was asked to accept, on the basis of his unsupported and unconvincing evidence, was that as a very impoverished student he had paid a dealer a total of some 25,000 Euros in 2007 or 2008 for two ancient books or manuscripts, Malleus Maleficarum and the Wycliffe Bible; that the books were worth hugely more than he had paid for them, and were in fact, to his knowledge, works of the utmost rarity and value; and that despite his hand to mouth existence and his reliance on state benefits and loans from friends and family, he chose, rather than sell the books or secure them in safety, to keep them, uninsured, in his bags in a Camberwell bedsit. I found that proposition wholly incredible, and I reject it, just as I reject his plainly inflated valuations of his computer equipment, and his claims for the value of the gemstones which he never had professionally valued but claims to have lost. The proposition is all the more incredible when one considers that on his own account it was 11 days before he forced entry to his own room. If he had truly believed that goods of such enormous value had been thrown away by the defendant, he would not have waited one day, let alone eleven, before re-entering his room. I also take into account that the police record of the property which he complained had been taken makes no mention of either Malleus Maleficarum or of the Wycliffe Bible. I cannot accept that he ever owned either book in an ancient or valuable edition, or that he owned valuable emeralds.

Nor do I accept that the claimant lost £6500 in cash. It is difficult to conceive that the claimant, who is a well travelled man and not wholly unworldly, could have thought that the Lauterpacht Centre in Cambridge would have welcomed payment in cash, and I am quite unable to accept his stated reason for keeping such a sum in his bedsit, namely that he did not have time to go to the bank. He was not a man in a high pressure job. On his own evidence he rose in the late morning on 3 September 2015 to go to the IALS library to conduct his research, which (even if he worked late in the evening) does not suggest great pressure of time, and his statements for his account at the Co-operative Bank (up to February 2015) show that he was in the habit of paying cash into his account.

The claimant also claims £50,000 for the loss of what he terms his academic position at Cambridge, namely his admission (on payment) to work for a year at the Lauterpacht Centre. Because of the loss of the £6500, he had to forfeit his place there. He explained that loss in terms of the damage to his prospects of academic advancement. He would have advanced his academic profile and he would have been a member of the academic staff at Cambridge a year later. Even had I accepted that he did lose the cash, I would have regarded the claimed consequential loss (if foreseeable) as fanciful and speculative in the extreme.

In my judgment, on 3 September 2015 the defendant lost patience with the claimant and unlawfully entered his room and threw out his possessions. Those possessions did no doubt include a number of books which were important to the claimant, and I am prepared to accept that they also included two computers, a hard drive, a camera, many academic notes of great personal value to the claimant, political documents relating to his work as cultural co-ordinator of the Azanian National Union, and a number of cultural artefacts, including some coloured gemstones. As I say, I reject the claimant’s valuations of what he lost, which in my view are fanciful figures plucked out of the air. In my judgment the claimant seized the opportunity created by the defendant’s actions to exaggerate grossly the extent and value of what he had lost, probably with a view to improving his negotiating position in the Lambeth proceedings.

The defendant’s actions amounted to wrongful interference with the claimant’s goods. The claim is pleaded as trespass to goods, although the cause of action might more appropriately have been put in conversion, by taking the goods away and disposing of them or allowing others to do so. It seems that there was also trespass to land, although no loss was caused by the entry and securing of the room. The loss was caused by the defendant’s disposal of the claimant’s property, whether by leaving it outside to be removed by others, or by taking it away himself to dispose of it elsewhere.

I did not have the benefit of any submissions from either party as to the basis on which I should assess damages. I do not think that the measure of damages depends on whether the defendant’s actions are more appropriately categorised as trespass to goods or as conversion. In principle, it seems to me that the measure of damage should be the market value of the goods at the date of conversion or trespass. Given that I reject the claimant’s inflated and exaggerated claim, it is difficult to find a rational basis on which to calculate the market value of that which probably was taken from him, namely two computers, a camera, a Blackberry phone (described in the Claim Form as a Blue Berry), a hard drive, clothes, CDs, three gemstones of uncertain but probably modest value, and a number of modern books. Much though I sympathise with the claimant’s loss of his academic papers, degree certificates, and political and research documents, I do not see how I can put a market value on them. It seems to me that the best I can do is compensate him in very approximate terms for the market value of the lost goods. It would hardly be fair to confine him to the actual market value of (for instance) an elderly computer or a pair of trousers, which would be nominal, and it therefore seems to me that he is entitled to the replacement value of the goods. Doing the best that I can, I assess his loss in the sum of £5000.

I will hear the parties on the consequences of this judgment. In principle, subject to any part 36 offers or other admissible offers of settlement, it seems to me that the claimant is likely to be entitled to some at least of his costs, but I should warn him that since the claim has, as I have found, been grossly exaggerated, and should have been brought in or transferred to the County Court, perhaps by way of counterclaim in the possession proceedings, I am unlikely, subject to submissions, to allow him more than a part of the costs which he has incurred. I will also hear the parties on the question of whether the judgment sum should be set off against any sum which the defendant recovers against the claimant in the Lambeth County Court, and on whether the detailed assessment of any costs order which I make should be transferred to Lambeth to be conducted together with any assessment in respect of the possession proceedings.