Property dealer ordered to pay £700,000 after chaotic court case

A property dealer who says that he did £92 million of business with the scandal-hit Home Reit has been ordered by a court to pay £700,000 to an intermediary after a chaotic hearing in which the judge deemed most of the witnesses not “credible”.
Christopher Downing was excoriated by Judge Claire Jackson for evidence “replete with whataboutism”, for “avoiding answering for his decisions or actions by turning to what he thought were issues with the claimant’s case” and for failing “to produce documents which would be expected from him, especially his bank statements”.
She also said that his evidence “as to Decent Home Standards and how these apply in the property industry can objectively be shown to be wrong”, while lambasting him for “controlling” behaviour in the “witness box” and for referring to Jessica Few, the vice-president of one of his companies, as a “23-year-old girl”. “Ms Few is not a girl, she is a woman,” the judge said.
The case, heard in the commercial court of the High Court in Leeds, had been brought by Tim Holmes, a property intermediary. He alleged that Downing and the estate of a former business partner had reneged on a deal to pay him £900,000 in fees for his services in acquiring properties in northeast England in 2020. Downing’s partner was Meyrick Cox, the late City banker, an old Etonian who played in the school’s wall game team alongside his captain Boris Johnson, the former prime minister.
Of the alleged fees due, £700,000 related to a deal involving 161 properties bought by Downing and Cox for £8.25 million and then sold to the Home Long Income Fund, the private forerunner to Home Reit, the scandal-plagued housing-for-the-homeless group.
The properties were leased to the Liverpool-based Big Help Project, a charity that was once one of Home Reit’s biggest tenants but is now under investigation by the Charity Commission. Both Home Reit and Home Long Income Fund, which were set up by Alvarium, the investment manager, are under investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority.
After a five-day hearing, Jackson concluded in her verdict that “this is a claim where there has been much heat, but little light, brought to the case by the parties’ conduct”, but the judge upheld Holmes’ claim over £700,000 of fees, while throwing out £200,000 relating to a block of flats in Newcastle.
In doing so, she said she had relied on “contemporaneous documents”, including an email headed “Tim — fees” sent in March 2020 by Few to Emma Lloyd, Downing’s lawyer, who then worked at DLA Piper, and copied to both Downing and Holmes.
Otherwise, the judge had little time for the key witnesses’ evidence. Of Holmes, she said: “By the end of the first hour of his evidence, it was clear to me that the claimant could talk, and distract, for England.” She found him “prone to exaggeration” and a “consummate salesman who is likely extremely effective”, but “when his answers are forensically analysed, they are not always accurate”.
Few, she found, had been “in thrall” to Downing, with her evidence “frequently confusing and confused” and showing “a lack of understanding of employment, agency relations and more generally business and property transactions”.
The judge also was scathing about Peter Mitchell, the Big Help boss, saying that “in the witness box [he] said what he wanted, not caring whether it was accurate or not” and that he would “speak effusively for his friends even if that requires the telling of untruths, until they are his enemies, when he will turn on them with whole-hearted venom”.
She said she had also taken into account Downing’s remark during cross-examination that “oh, by the way, I also said that I had autism”.