Won Court Case - Builder is a man of straw

[The Pheasant]

We were awarded £150K at the Sheriff court after a cowboy builder destroyed our property. He's the only Director of the Ltd company that carried out the work. We were successful in freezing his business trading account, however, there was less than £4000 in it.

He never bothered to appear at court to defend the action and continues to ignore all correspondence from our legal team. Our legal costs are currently running at £10K and we can't afford to throw any more money at this.

The Pollice are also involved and building a criminal case against the fraudulent builder whom we paid in excess of £150K up front. . Two QS reports valued the works at under £25K.
They advised us that he could be facing a prison sentence for the scale of the fraud, but this doesn't help us get our money back.

He doesn't own his house and assets probably come in at no more than £30K. We're beside ourselves as we don't have sufficient funds to complete the building project.

Is there any way of recovering the huge financial loss we have incurred?

[R0b]

Very unlikely to recover more than what you have I'm afraid. Limited companies have a separate liability to the director's unless you have been able to prove (and actually claim) in court that the limited company was a facade and the court agreed you could pursue the director as being personally liable. Otherwise your only recourse is against the limited company and whatever assets it may have.

Ideally your legal team should have done sufficient due diligence on the limited company and advised you as to whether it was worth pursuing given the company's lack of funds.

Always pay builders and tradesmen by installments measured by milestones of completion as they don't need to be paid the full amount up front unless we are talking about a small job. That amount of money to hand over in a single instalment is always asking for trouble.

Have you considered whether you are covered by any insurance?

Probably not the news you want to hear but this is very much a common occurrence around the UK.

[echat11]

I'm not sure you want to go down this road, but get a asset recovery specialist on a fixed fee to see if there are any other assets tucked away somewhere. Over £150,000 is quite a large sum to get rid easily.