Steve McCabe
Main Page: Steve McCabe (Labour - Birmingham, Selly Oak)Department Debates - View all Steve McCabe's debates with the HM Treasury
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
I want to raise an issue on behalf of my constituent, Mrs Noureen Shah. She is one of several people caught in the same nightmare, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (Mr Spellar) and my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) have constituents who are also affected.
Mrs Shah was persuaded in 2006 to invest in the Cube, a development in the Westside district of Birmingham. It includes offices, an hotel and 244 apartments. Mrs Shah paid a deposit of about £65,000—her children’s legacy—and like other investors she was told that the properties would be completed in 2008. Gateley solicitors say that that is not the case and, apparently, buried in the large contract is a clause that covers delays. That is just as well, because the building contract was not let until 22 June 2007—two days before the cut-off point—which, not surprisingly, made a 2008 completion date impossible.
Early in 2010, the developers, the Birmingham Development Company, went bust and PricewaterhouseCoopers was called in as the administrator. The company was eventually restructured as Aruna Project LLP. Nearly half the investors cannot raise a mortgage because of the collapse in the value of the properties, but director Neil Edgington of Aruna is not too concerned, telling Property Week in April 2011,
“I’m sure some”—
that is, some investors—
“will need more of a nudge than others. Some people will need a bit of encouragement via the legal route”.
Such intimidation has been the hallmark ever since. Lloyds TSB claims that it is
“working closely with administrators to ensure all outstanding cases are handled fairly”,
but it appears that “fairly” means that the Cube, which started out on the loan book of HBOS, is going to be paid for by bankrupting and evicting from their own homes the small investors who have been foolish enough to believe the sales pitch.
Lloyds and Aruna are now using the solicitors Gateley to threaten those small investors. It is a disgrace, and I would appreciate it if the Secretary of State would agree to have a look at what has happened in this case.