Refik Yalchin Michael v Homes-R-Us UK Ltd

The Applicant seeks to have a restriction entered against the title of property owned by the Respondent company. He does so on the basis that he provided the purchase funds, and so is entitled to a beneficial interest under a resulting trust, or through a constructive trust based on an alleged agreement that the property would be purchased in the Respondent’s name for this benefit. That property is known as 102 Breck Road, Anfield, Liverpool L4 2RD. The freehold interest is registered against title number MS77136. The Respondent has been the registered proprietor since 30^th April 2015, having apparently paid the price of £28,500 on 23^rd April 2015.

Although this is a case between an individual and a company, it is very much a family affair, because the sole director of the Respondent, Mr Peter Michael, is the Applicant’s stepfather. The Applicant has previously been a secretary of the Respondent company and remains a minority shareholder.

The Applicant’s case is quite a simple one. The Respondent company was offered the opportunity to purchase the freehold interest in the subject property because it was the owner of two long leasehold interests in that property. Mr Michael discussed this with the Applicant and agreed that his stepson would provide the funds to cover the purchase in the Respondent’s name and that the property would then be transferred into the Applicant’s name a year later.

The Respondent’s position in its Statement of Case was that, while the purchase monies were provided by the Applicant, this was by way of part-payment of a debt owed by the Applicant to Mr Michael arising out of the re-mortgage of Mr Michael’s matrimonial home, which he lived in with Mrs Susan Michael (the Applicant’s mother).

At the hearing, the Applicant was represented by Mr Madge-Wyld, while the Respondent was represented by Mr Wand. I am very grateful to both Mr Madge-Wyld and Mr Wand for their extremely helpful written and oral submissions.

The hearing was conducted via the cloud video platform, which was a sensible and proportionate way of dealing with the matter. I apologise to the parties that I have not been able to provide them with a decision sooner than this due to pressures of other work. The delay is particularly regrettable as this is actually a very straightforward case in which the Applicant is plainly entitled to the restriction that he seeks. I struggle to understand why the Respondent, through Mr Michael, resisted the application in the first place or how Mr Michael felt able to continue that resistance through the hearing and his oral evidence.

I will attempt to deal with all the key points in this decision (bearing in mind the Practice Direction on reasons for decisions issued by the Senior President of Tribunals), but I can assure the parties that I have had all of the points raised well in mind when considering my decision.

I have already referred to some of the background in the previous section, but it is necessary to say a little more at this stage.

Because this involves an element of a family dispute, the Respondent’s case requires the Tribunal to go back earlier than the purchase of this property.

The starting point on the Respondent’s case is a property known as 85 The Mall, London N14 6LL, where Mr Michael had lived with the Applicant’s mother. Title to that property was registered under title number MC297021. According to a historical copy of register of title that I have seen, Mrs Michael became the sole registered proprietor in May 2001, although the charges register suggests that the property may have been purchased in around 1989.

The Respondent’s case, through Mr Michael, is that the property needed to be remortgaged in May 2013. Mr Michael says that a remortgage was arranged in the joint names of him, Mrs Michael, and the Applicant. The Respondent’s pleaded case was that it was agreed between the three of them that the Applicant would pay £120,000 to the Respondent. Mr Michael’s written evidence was that it had been agreed that the Applicant would contribute a one-third share of the mortgage payments, but that it was Mr Michael who paid all the instalments due on the mortgage as well as other costs associated with the property.

At around the same time in May 2013, the Applicant purchased the leasehold interest in a property known as Flat 5, 74 Kensington L7 8XB. This was seemingly purchased as a buy-to-let property and the Respondent company managed the property for the Applicant, collecting rent and passing it on to the Applicant. This was the second investment property that the Applicant had bought, having purchased a different property in around 2009.

Turning to the Breck Road property, the Respondent had a longstanding connection with this and adjoining property at 100 Breck Road, as it owned two long leasehold interests in respect of Flat 1 and Flat 2. (Footnote: ¹) In its capacity as a lessee, the Respondent received notice from the then-freeholder offering it a right of first refusal on a proposed sale at auction. That notice was dated 22^nd December 2014, and proposed a price of £30,000.

Solicitors for the freeholder chased the Respondent company for any response by way of an email on 25^th February 2015. Mr Michael replied on behalf of the Respondent the same day, proposing an offer of £20,000. The freeholder’s solicitors rejected this offer by email on 26^th February, indicating that they proposed to go ahead with sale by auction. From emails in the bundle, it appears that this rejection email was forwarded onto the Applicant within an hour of being received. No further text or explanation was added to the email.

On 4^th March 2015, the Applicant’s mother and sister transferred a total of £12,000 into his current account. This brought the balance in that account up to £29,595.05.

On 19^th March 2015, the solicitors acting for the freeholder wrote to Groom Halliday Solicitors stating that they had been informed that they were acting for the Respondents and that a purchase had been agreed for the price of £28,500. That email was forwarded on to the Respondent’s email account and that forwarded email was itself forwarded on to the Applicant, without any comment being added, all within the space of just under three hours.

On 26^th March 2015, the freeholder’s solicitors sent a draft contract and form TR1 for the sale and transfer of 102 Breck Road to the Respondent’s solicitors. Again, this was forwarded on to the Respondent’s email address, and then forwarded again from that address to the Applicant’s email address the same day, without any further comment.

On 2^nd April 2015, having received some further funds so that his current account balance was over £30,000, the Applicant transferred £25,000 and £5,000 to the Respondent’s solicitors. A ledger card from the solicitors shows receipt of those transfers. (Footnote: ²)

The transfer of 102 Breck Road was completed on 23^rd April. Groom Halliday subsequently transferred £1,460 to Mr Michael. This was the sum remaining out of the £30,000 transferred by the Applicant. (Footnote: ³)

Following registration of the Respondent as proprietor, someone at the Respondent company sent a copy of the updated register of title to the Applicant by email. Again, there was no text in the email itself to explain the attachment.

The Respondent, through Mr Michael, granted a tenancy of part of the property for a term of six months beginning on 7^th June 2015. The Respondent then sent a copy of this tenancy agreement to the Applicant, along with a tenancy agreement for the Applicant’s property at Flat 5, 74 Kensington.

Occasional payments were made from a business bank account to the Applicant with the reference “Breck Road”. The Applicant contends that these were payments of the rent that had been collected and were due to him. The Respondent contends that these were payments made by Mr Michael to the Applicant as part of his fatherly duties towards his stepson.

The Applicant relied on an email and letter, both dated 26^th August 2022, from the Respondent to the Applicant. The text of the letter was as follows.

“Dear Refik,

“RE: 102 Breck Road, Anfield, Liverpool, L4 2RD

“You purchased the above mentioned property for the sum of £28k, with substantial discount which was passed over to yourself as a goodwill gesture.

“You wish to transfer the property on your name. In view of the delay, the property values have increased, and therefore as has the capital gains liability.

“You are urged to seek advice as my accountant regards this as a sale. As such, please advise of your intended course of action. I await your reply within 28 days.

“Yours Sincerely,

“Peter Michael”

The email was almost identical but it did not include the subject heading in quite the same way. The email subject was instead identified as “102 Breck Road”. The Respondent had initially denied that this, and some other correspondence of the same date, had been prepared and sent by or on behalf of Mr Michael and that it had not been done with his knowledge and consent. In Mr Michael’s witness statement, he does not repeat this denial, saying instead that the 26^th August emails had been “referred to as ‘without prejudice’ and so should not have been openly referenced”. In fact, the email that I have referred to above was not labelled “without prejudice” although the printed letter was, as were other letters and at least one of the other emails of that date.

At the pre-trial review hearing, Mr Wand accepted, in my view rightly, that this correspondence was not truly without prejudice and the Applicant could rely on it. It was unclear at that stage whether the position set out in the Statement of Case was still being maintained despite the lack of any supporting evidence in Mr Michael’s witness statement. By the time of the final hearing, Mr Wand was able to make clear on instructions that Mr Michael was not disputing the authenticity of the correspondence and would only be saying that he could not recall it.

One other piece of the 26^th August 2022 correspondence is worth noting in light of the Respondent’s arguments in this case. In one of the letters, Mr Michael wrote to the Applicant about 85 The Mall, saying as follows.

“Please see below for a breakdown of the costs associated with the general running of the household, a third of which you will be responsible for as of today, Friday 26th August 2022.

“You are one third registered owner of the property, but contribute nothing to costs, yet you stand to gain financially.”

The letter included a table setting out the costs of council tax, a loan, water, repairs, and a television licence. It was agreed that the loan was the mortgage secured against the property. Mr Michael had identified that the monthly amount was £1,833.61, and that the Applicant’s share of that was £611.20.

The Applicant also relies on a recording that he made covertly of a discussion between him and Mr Michael on 28^th October 2022. I will return to that later.

Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Michael became embroiled in the process of getting divorced. The Tribunal was referred to the Form E completed by Mr Michael in associated financial relief proceedings. That form identified numerous properties that he claimed to have an interest in, including both Breck Road flats, but did not specify the subject property.

As a result of those proceedings, Gisby Harrison were instructed to handle a sale of 85 The Mall. The client completion statement records that the clients were Mr Michael, Mrs Michael, and the Applicant. The sale price was £950,000. The expenses that were deducted from this included a payment of £8,580.39 to Mr Michael. The balance once all expenses had been deducted was £564,519.69, which was to be divided ²/₃ to Mrs Michael and ¹/₃ to the Applicant.

There is one further feature worth recording at this stage, which is that at the start of the final hearing Mr Wand informed the Tribunal on behalf of the Respondent that Mr Michael wanted to give further evidence by way of examination-in-chief to explain that as part of the discussion prior to the purchase of the subject property, he had told the Applicant that he would transfer that property to him if he paid the balance of the debt off. I will deal with the evidence that Mr Michael actually gave later on in this decision.

The basic law was not in dispute between the parties and it was not necessary for either counsel to spend long dealing with this in their submissions. Both skeleton arguments referred to extracts from the 10^th edition of Megarry & Wade: The Law of Real Property, and while I have carefully considered the authorities that were referred to as well, I think that the relevant principles can be stated for the purposes of this decision by quoting from that work. (Footnote: ⁴) Dealing first with resulting trusts, the learned editors say this: (Footnote: ⁵)

“Where land is conveyed to one person, but the purchase-money is provided by another as purchaser, there is presumed to be a resulting trust in favour of the person providing the purchase-money. If V conveys land to P, A being the real purchaser and as such providing the purchase-money, prima facie P holds on a resulting trust for A. Similarly, if A provides part of the purchase-money, provided this is at the time of purchase or is referable to money paid at the time of purchase, A acquires a proportionate share in equity. Nevertheless these are only presumptions, and will not apply in the following cases.

(i)

Where they are rebutted by evidence that P was intended to benefit, A’s money being in effect a gift or loan to P.

(ii)

Where they are rebutted by the presumption of advancement which arises if P is the wife or child of A.

(iii)

Where legal title to a family home is held jointly, but the equitable interests are undeclared, the Supreme Court has held … that the ‘time has come to make it clear … that in the case of the purchase of a house or flat in joint names for joint occupation by a married or unmarried couple, where both are responsible for any mortgage, there is no presumption of a resulting trust arising from their having contributed to the deposit (or indeed the rest of the purchase) in unequal shares”. However, … this does not mean that a resulting trust cannot arise. It means, rather, that the court must search for the true intention of the parties and should not resort to presumptions about the parties intentions. In such cases, therefore, the size of the beneficial interests may be determined by reference to the default presumption that ‘equity follows the law’ or the express or inferred common intention of the parties, but a resulting trust is not excluded as a matter of principle.”

Turning to constructive trusts, Megarry & Wade includes the following. (Footnote: ⁶)

“… It is not unusual for land to be purchased in A’s name alone, but for B to claim an interest in the property by reason either of some contribution direct or indirect to its acquisition, or from having made some improvement to it, or because they have acted detrimentally in response to assurances made by A about the land. To succeed, B will have to demonstrate:

(i)

a common intention that B should have a beneficial interest in the property; and

(ii)

that B acted to his or her detriment on the basis of that common intention so that it would be inequitable for A to deny B an interest.

The House of Lords has now classified this trust as constructive, and have gone on to indicate that where the property is used by a couple for residential purposes, it is more likely (and usually preferable) that a constructive trust will arise rather than a resulting trust. However, this will not always be the case, and … cases should not be determined on the basis of preconceived assumptions or presumptions. What was important was a search for the parties’ true intentions in relation to the property, which might indicate either a resulting trust or constructive trust. The context was important, but the context (e.g. residential or commercial) did not of itself determine the outcome. Of course, there may well be situations where this constructive trust is indistinguishable in origin from a presumed resulting trust: e.g. where B’s detrimental act consists of a contribution to the cost of acquiring the property and the common intention of A and B is that B’s interest should be commensurate with B contribution, But neither form of trust will arise if B’s contribution is by way of gift or loan.”

Finally, I note here that in Hallman v Harkins [2019] UKUT 245 (LC), the Upper Tribunal explained that this Tribunal’s role is to determine whether or not a party has a beneficial interest in property, and is therefore entitled to a restriction, but not to go on and determine the extent of that beneficial interest.

This is primarily a factual dispute turning on the competing accounts offered by the Applicant and Mr Michael. As Mr Wand recognised in his closing submissions, the Tribunal will need to form a view on the credibility of the two witnesses.

I explained the approach taken by the Tribunal to evaluating witness evidence in Ebanks v Salcombe Road Ltd [2025] UKFTT 924 (PC), at [67]-[86]. I intend to adopt the same approach here, without needing to repeat everything said in those passages. For the avoidance of doubt though I specifically remind myself that in these proceedings I must apply the civil standard of proof in determining disputes of fact, i.e. the balance of probabilities, or whether something is more likely than not. All findings that follow in this judgment are made on that basis.

In my judgment, the Applicant was an honest witness, doing his best to assist the Tribunal with his recollection of events going back several years.

The same cannot be said of Mr Michael. His evidence was hopelessly confused and inconsistent in places. At times he declared that we should move on from difficult questions, showing that he was seeking to evade answering them. He refused to answer some questions, which I conclude was because he could not give an honest answer that supported his case. Many of his answers did not engage with the substance of the question, but sought to advance argument or were used in an attempt to interrogate counsel, while some questions needed to be put to him repeatedly in order to get any sort of answer. I consider that his evidence was coloured by his feelings of grievance over the end of his marriage to Mrs Michael and the breakdown of family relations, and possibly also by financial problems that he seems to have fallen into. In my judgment, that has led him to seek to rewrite history and come up with an account which was not true. All in all, he was not a remotely credible witness.

I accept the Applicant’s submission that Mr Michael was lying in his evidence to the Tribunal. Where there is any dispute between him and the Applicant on the evidence, I am satisfied that the Applicant’s evidence is to be preferred.

Although the focus in this referred matter is on what was, or was not, agreed in 2015 about the purchase of the subject property, the Respondent’s arguments make it necessary to go further back and see what may have been agreed when 85 The Mall was remortgaged.

In this regard, it is noticeable that there was no documentary record of the agreement that the Respondent, through Mr Michael, now says was made. Of course, this is also a criticism that could be levelled at the Applicant’s case in relation to the 2015 purchase. The Tribunal readily recognises that many of these disputes frequently arise precisely because there was no written record made and that this is not uncommon in the context of family agreements. Nonetheless, it is surprising, to say the least, that there are no written records of agreements to support the Respondent’s case that there was an agreement in 2013 and another agreement in 2015, particularly when at least one of those agreements involved the Respondent, which was a company rather than a family member (albeit a family-owned company).

Having heard both parties, give evidence, I am satisfied that there was no such agreement in 2013 as claimed by the Respondent and Mr Michael.

The Respondent’s pleaded case as to the agreement can be readily rejected, because it would be completely illogical to have an agreement that the Applicant would owe the Respondent money in respect of a property that the Respondent company was not involved with and had no interest in.

I also reject the modified version presented by Mr Michael in his evidence that it was agreed that money was owed to him. The case seemed to fluctuate as to whether it was agreed that the Applicant would pay a third of the mortgage contributions, or be indebted to Mr Michael for them, or agreed to pay Mr Michael £120,000. That wavering strongly suggests there was no concrete agreement as Mr Michael contends and that this is all an attempt to project some agreement onto the remortgaging process.

I am satisfied that the first two possibilities can be readily excluded. A significant proportion of the sum borrowed in the remortgaging process was, on Mr Michael’s evidence, purely for Mrs Michael’s benefit, so an agreement to pay one-third of the mortgage costs would include paying a third of the share that was solely for her. That does not seem probable. Furthermore, if this supposed agreement had been reached, Mr Michael’s announcement in August 2022 that the Applicant was now responsible for a third of the mortgage costs is inexplicable. As it is, there is a far better explanation for that letter, which is that Mr Michael was lashing out in the midst of his property and financial affairs unravelling. This also explains the otherwise ridiculous suggestion that the Applicant had to pay a third of the cost of the television licence for the property simply because he stood to derive a financial benefit from that property in the future.

I am also satisfied that there was no agreement that the Applicant would pay Mr Michael £120,000. The numbers simply do not add up.

Mr Michael’s evidence was that the amount borrowed was £350,000. Somewhat oddly, in his Form E statement he said that £305,204 was owing, which as it was also said to be an interest only mortgage would mean that this lower figure was the amount borrowed. It is possible that this was simply a mistake, because the completion statement when the mortgage was repaid on sale of 85 The Mall has the amount paid to the lender as £354,381.68, which is more consistent with a loan of around £350,000 and either an early repayment penalty or some slight arrears.

On the basis that the amount borrowed was £350,000, as Mr Michael had said, two points are immediately noticeable. First £120,000 is more than a third of that figure. No reason was given as to why the Applicant would agree to pay more than a third of the amount borrowed. Secondly, Mr Michael’s evidence was that £60,000 of the loan went immediately to Mrs Michael, which reduces the amount that was used to pay off loans secured against the property to around £290,000. (Footnote: ⁷) But obviously, a third of that amount is even lower and much further away from the £120,000 figure claimed by Mr Michael.

There is a further problem for the Respondent, as prior to the remortgage the property was solely owned by Mrs Michael. Other than the existing charges over it, there was nothing to stop her distributing the beneficial interest in that property as she saw fit. Mr Michael struggled with this concept in oral evidence and his view seemed to be that his then wife owned the property with a couple of people. That evidence was contrary to the documentary material showing that she was the only owner. I do not think that Mr Michael was deliberately lying at this point in his evidence. I think it more likely that he was confused when dealing with issues that he had not previously thought about.

I note that there is no evidence from Mrs Michael to corroborate the Applicant’s version of events, but it would have been open to the Respondent to seek a witness summons so to a certain extent this cuts both ways. Even leaving that aside, had she attended and given evidence in support of the Applicant, the Respondent would have inevitably submitted that the Tribunal should discount it because she was being loyal to her son and so I do not consider that her absence is particularly significant.

I move forward now to the 2015 purchase of the subject property in the Respondent’s name. Having heard and reviewed all the evidence, I accept the Applicant’s account that he and Mr Michael agreed that he would put up the funds to buy the property as a way of growing his nascent property portfolio, but that it would be purchased in the Respondent’s name in the first instance as the right of first refusal under Landlord and Tenant Act 1987 belonged to the Respondent as the qualifying tenant.

I mentioned earlier that Mr Wand had flagged up on behalf of the Respondent the intention to adduce additional evidence from Mr Michael through examination-in-chief. Mr Wand had explained that this evidence would be to the effect that Mr Michael had agreed to transfer title to the subject property to the Applicant if the balance of the Applicant’s debt to him was paid off. Mr Madge-Wyld did not object to this course of action and so Mr Wand sought to ask some questions of Mr Michael.

It quickly became apparent that Mr Michael did not know what he was being asked about. I refused Mr Wand’s request to lead Mr Michael on this point, as it seemed to me that this would be unfair to the Applicant and would not be in keeping with the normal approach to evidence. The Tribunal then asked Mr Michael if there was anything else that he wanted to say about the agreement. He appeared to be very confused by this whole discussion and eventually said that he had forgotten.

Very soon afterwards, Mr Michael was asked in cross-examination whether it was still the Respondent’s case, as had been pleaded at Paragraph 19 of the Statement of Case, that there had been no agreement whatsoever that the Respondent would transfer title or any interest in the property to the Applicant. Mr Michael duly confirmed this position. This is entirely at odds with the new position that there was an agreement, but that it was conditional on part-payment of an existing debt. That position did, however, emerge to some extent during the course of subsequent cross-examination. In my judgment, Mr Michael’s inability to present a consistent account is because he was making it up. It is normally far easier to maintain a truthful account than it is to tell a lie that requires constant adjustment and development when it comes into contact with the truth.

In this case, it simply beggars belief that Mr Michael would direct that a debt that was entirely owed to him should be repaid by a payment to, or on behalf of, the Respondent company when he did not own all of the shares in that company so that he could personally only ever benefit from a portion of the supposed repayment. To make this suggestion even more bewildering, the Applicant was himself a shareholder of the Respondent company and so stood to benefit from any investment into the company. Mr Michael’s explanation that payment was made to the Respondent company because he was the sole director is no answer to this problem.

The position gets even worse for Mr Michael when the actual shareholdings are considered. The Companies House return for the Respondent company in 2014 indicated that he owned 60% of the shares and the Applicant owned 20% of them. The next return in 2015, shortly after the purchase, showed that Mr Michael’s shareholding had reduced to just 10%. The explanation that a debt owed to him personally was repaid in part by payment to his company is, quite frankly, totally absurd when considered in the context of his shareholding being reduced to just half the level of the Applicant’s share of the company.

The Respondent’s case that the Applicant paid the purchase price because he owed money to Mr Michael also falls down, because the position as at the time of purchase was that a one-third share of the mortgage payments made by Mr Michael would have come to under £10,000. It would make no sense for the Applicant to pay around three times the level of his supposed debt to Mr Michael. During the course of cross-examination, Mr Michael accepted that it could be said that his account that the Applicant owed him £120,000 made no sense. He was right to acknowledge that point. It is unfortunate that he did not demonstrate greater insight into the other difficulties with the Respondent’s position.

Mr Michael’s evidence about this is also plainly wrong even on its own terms. In his statement, he said that the Applicant had sent £28,500 to the Respondent’s bank account on 23^rd April 2015. He did not get any of these details correct. The amount transferred was £30,000, which was paid directly to a solicitor’s account some three weeks earlier than Mr Michael thought. All of this further demonstrates that his evidence about this transaction is not reliable.

I also note that Mr Michael and the Respondent have put forward different explanations over time, in correspondence, pleadings, and evidence. I consider that this continually evolving stance is because the underlying story is simply not true and is constantly needing to be tweaked to address inconsistencies and other evidence.

I reject as fanciful and absurd Mr Michael’s explanation that documents relating to the property were sent to the Applicant because Mr Michael was excited about the acquisition and wanted to keep him and other family members “in the loop”. This was not supported by the evidence, which does not show that all of these documents were sent to other people as well. It does not fit with having sent the Applicant a copy of the tenancy agreement for this property, which the Respondent contends he has no interest in, at the same time as sending him a tenancy agreement for a property which the Respondent accepts that the Applicant does own. I also reject the alternative explanation that was advanced that Mr Michael was trying to let the Applicant know how much it would cost to own and run this property. There is no suggestion to that effect in any of the covering correspondence and this explanation makes no sense given that the Applicant did actually pay some of the bills. These are desperate lies made up by Mr Michael in his oral evidence to try to explain away damaging documentary material.

I also reject Mr Michael’s evidence for and explanation about rent payments to the Applicant. It was quite clear that the Applicant was asking for these in relation to rent for properties that he owned and they were being paid to him as such by the Respondent in its capacity as a property manager. I do not accept that Mr Michael would transfer money to his stepson out of a sense of fatherly responsibility while labelling it with the identifying details of a property. The far more likely explanation is that the payment details referred to Breck Road because that was the subject of the payments. This was, I am afraid, another lie from Mr Michael.

The Applicant’s case is also consistent with the August 2022 correspondence. I have already set this out above. It almost speaks for itself. Mr Michael was unable to provide any sensible explanation for why he had not mentioned this supposed debt or agreement when he wrote about the possibility of transferring the property to the Applicant. That correspondence can only be read as accepting that the Applicant was entitled to a transfer.

The Applicant’s case is also consistent with the recorded conversation in October 2022. I note here two points of caution about this recording. First, the Applicant knew that the recording was taking place and so may have been careful about what he said. Secondly, the Respondent contended that the recording had been edited. I should say that I refused an extremely late application to rely on expert evidence to support this allegation for reasons that I gave during the pre-trial review. Having listened to the relevant parts of the recording several times, I accept that there is at least one place in which a clear “glitch” in the audio can be detected. For the purposes of this analysis, I am prepared to assume in the Respondent’s favour that this indicates where the recording may have been spliced to conceal a part that has been removed, although I must stress that I do not have the evidential basis to make a positive finding to that effect.

Even if there had been some editing, the problem for the Respondent is what is included in the recording, which contains a series of damaging admissions by Mr Michael. I have listened to the key parts several times, and it is quite clear that Mr Michael acknowledges that the Applicant is entitled to have the property transferred to him and that he should have received rent payments for the property (in cross-examination Mr Michael denied that the discussion about rent payments related to the Breck Road property but was it was part of section of the conversation that was all about that property I reject his evidence on that point). At no time during those discussions does he say anything about a debt owed to him. Mr Michael was unable to say that he would have dealt with this in some missing passage from the recording. It seems to me that the fact that Mr Michael was unaware of the recording does not help him. While I need to treat what the Applicant said with care, because he was aware of the recording and so might not have been entirely frank, one would have expected Mr Michael to talk candidly and frankly. Importantly, there were several opportunities for him to identify any conditions for a transfer and he did not do so. In my judgment, there is a simple explanation for this: there were no such conditions because that was not what had been agreed.

Mr Wand pointed out on behalf of the Respondent that the Applicant’s prior property investments had been in residential property, as had some subsequent investments. In contrast, the primary motivation for any purchase of the subject property as an investment would be for the potential for letting out part of it as commercial premises, as subsequently happened. I do not think that this helps show that the Applicant was not the true purchaser behind the scenes. The sample size of property investments both at the time of purchase and since is too small to act as any meaningful evidence that the Applicant would not be interested in investing in commercial property.

There are four particular points that might be identified as potential weaknesses in the Applicant’s case and which can conveniently be addressed at this stage.

First, that his alleged agreement was not recorded in writing. I have already dealt with this to some extent. In my view, it is not surprising as he was being assisted in the purchase by his stepfather, who he naturally trusted.

Secondly, that the Applicant did not maintain his requests for rent. Again, I consider that he trusted his stepfather to do the right thing. I also accept that there may have been other events in the Applicant’s life which took priority.

Thirdly, that he did not press for a transfer of the property until 2022. While there is some force in this point, in my view the answer is again that he trusted his stepfather to follow through eventually and there was no pressing need to have the transfer process completed.

Finally, the Respondent pointed to correspondence from the Applicant to Liverpool City Council disputing liability for non domestic rates for the property. In my judgment, that needs to be understood in the context of two particular points.

The first point is that this was after this dispute had arisen and it was being asserted against the Applicant that he did not have any interest in the property. It is understandable in that situation that he might be circumspect in what he says to the local authority. The second is that it is apparent that someone had filled in an online form saying that they were the Applicant, but he was saying that he had not done this. The point that he made in the correspondence was that according to HM Land Registry records the property was owned by the Respondent. That was an accurate statement, but I do not read this as resiling from any claim to ownership of the property.

For those reasons, I am satisfied that the Applicant advanced the entirety of the purchase monies. This was not to repay a debt to anyone, but as part of agreement reached with his stepfather, on behalf of the Respondent, that the property would be purchased for the Applicant in the Respondent’s name.

In those circumstances, it seems to me that he has demonstrated an entitlement to a beneficial interest by way of either a resulting trust or a common intention constructive trust. To the extent that it is necessary to decide between those two routes, I am inclined to say that it is via the mechanism of resulting trust as this was an investment purchase and he paid the whole purchase price, but I rather doubt that it makes any difference to the outcome of this case.

For the reasons given above, the Chief Land Registrar will be directed to give effect to the Applicant’s application as if the objection had not been made.

The Applicant has been successful in these proceedings. My preliminary view is that he should be entitled to his costs. The order that accompanies this decision will allow both parties to make written submissions on liability for costs, including the basis for a costs assessment if any order is made, in light of that provisional view.