But he has done nothing illegal.
A star of reality TV show Storage Hunters has been accused of holding a village community to ransom after secretly buying up small parcels of land and now trying to charge them £30,000 each to use their own parking spaces.
Daniel Hill – a businessman who spent just £18,000 to acquire the contested plots – is demanding residents of Haslingfield, Cambridgeshire, pay him £576 a week each in perpetuity for the right to park outside their own homes, spaces which they had previously been using for free for decades.
Hill, 41, is understood to have also demanded £200,000 ‘compensation’ from an elderly couple to forfeit his right to develop on a small green space where they have lovingly grown and maintained a picturesque hedge and ancient willow tree since the 1970s.
On the one hand, the villagers knew nothing of the auction. However, it would seem that none of them really paid any attention to their deeds. Had they done so, they would have realised their vulnerability – especially the one who didn’t own his own garden. So on the one hand, I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy. On the other, if this jerk wasn’t so blatantly greedy, he’d probably have got away with it. As it is, what he is demanding amounts to extortion, such that I expect he is trying to get them to buy the land at an inflated rate rather than get the unrealistic rent. It may be legal, but it’s sharp practice and highly unethical, so I really hope the villagers find a way of handing him his arse on a plate. What a nasty piece of work.
A long drive in the back of a Transit with a bag on his head should work wonders.
Yeah, a plastic bag.
What about squatter’s rights? The company which I used to work for lost property they owned and had deeds for, because of of it. https://www.gov.uk/squatting-law/squatters-rights-to-property
There is probably a case for this. It will be interesting to see how it pans out. It would certainly be amusing if it went that way as he would have paid money for nothing.
Whilst I agree he is an arse, the outrage of the vehicle owners over having to pay to park on land they do not own is simply delicious.
Paying a reasonable fee would be fine. His proposed charges are outrageous.
Indeed, I wonder if there is something more to this?
My gut feeling is that the charges are deliberately outrageous in order to trigger an attempt to buy the land off him at an inflated price, thereby he makes a quick profit.
That’s probably what it is. Therefore, the correct strategy for the villagers is to maintain a united front and threaten him with the prospect of lengthy and very costly litigation without any prospect of making a profit. Then he’ll have to make a deal on reasonable terms to cut his losses.