Enforcing A Ccj And Successfully Claiming Against The Correct Party (letting Agent)

[groupoffour]

This post concerns how to best successfully enforce a CCJ against an unlawful landlord, apologies for the length:

We, the four previous tenants, are now creditor of a small claims county court judgment (CCJ) against the defendant, who we understood to be our landlord (the person who countersigned the tenancy agreement that we signed and the person we most often dealt with) and the apparent “boss” of the letting agency which managed the house.

In our ignorance we had proceeded with our TDS non-compliance case before confirming the director of the company and owner of the house. The judgment concerned non-compliance of the Tenancy Deposit Scheme (TDS). The CCJ requires the defendant to pay us back our deposit plus its value another 3 times plus court fees. Although the defendant initially defended our claim and launched a counterclaim, on the day of the hearing the defendant did not appear before the judge and we won the decision.

In the hope of successfully enforcing the CCJ, our subsequent investigations (Companies House) have since found that the person who countersigned the tenancy agreement (now the creditor of the CCJ) may not actually have been the director and secretary of the letting agency. The name of the “Consent signature” is different to that on the tenancy agreement and business card: what appears as his surname on the tenancy agreement actually appears as his first of three forenames on the Companies House appointment of director document. In fact the name we recognise as the counter sign on our tenancy agreement appears in the section: “director, secretary etc must sign the form below”. Within my limited knowledge, this appears to mean that the “consent signature” is the ‘acting director and secretary (for whom an a residential address is provided) and the name below is a (or the main?) director. Apologies for this lack of clarity but I have no experience or expertise reading such documents; does it sound as though the CCJ was made against the correct individual?

A further complication appears to be the fact that the letting agency is stated as being “dissolved... struck off the Register under Section 652(5) of the Companies Act 1985 on 28 August 2007 and dissolved by notice... dated 4 September 2007”. This is despite the date of appointment, in the above section being 16/02/2007. Assuming the CCJ was made against the right person, how might the dissolution of the letting agency affect our potential enforcement?

Finally to enable us to make an enforcement against the correct person by the best route, we found that the property where we were tenants is owned by a third party couple from the local area and presumably was/is only being managed by the letting agency. I imagine in this case the house we would not be able to be involved in any potential enforcement route.

Sincere thanks in advance for any time and advice offered regarding our situation.

N.B.:

This issue was detailed in a different thread which was originally created concerning the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. This thread is being created concerning the subsequent outcome of that issue and is of a much more general subject matter. I write this to explain potentially seeming as though I have posted the same thing twice.