The family of a billionaire Tory landlord used a no-fault eviction to throw out a tenant after he refused a £1,680 annual rent increase having reported mould, damp and cold, the Guardian can reveal.
The flat is part of a rental portfolio part-owned by Zameer Choudrey, who has donated £1.3m to the Conservatives through his wholesale company Bestway, which has a turnover of £4.5bn a year.
He shares ownership of a £15m mansion in Hampstead and sits on the government benches in the House of Lords, which will scrutinise the renters reform bill announced this week – which sets out to ban the very “section 21” no-fault eviction practice he used.
The evicted tenant, Apolo Siskos, a data expert, was paying £1,400 a month for the one-bed flat in Golders Green, north-west London. He complained that the heating was faulty, meaning it was cold in winter, that he had to wait four months for a broken window to be fixed, and that his health was affected by damp and mould exacerbated by a roof leak – none of which was fixed for more than a year, he claimed.
When the Choudreys’ estate agent told Siskos in February that the landlord wanted to raise the rent by 10%, he replied saying he wanted a rent cut owing to the ongoing problems. Two weeks later, the agent said the landlord had decided to take back the property, fix the problems and re-market the property at a higher rent. Siskos was sent a section 21 eviction notice of possession.
The case will prove embarrassing for the Conservatives after Michael Gove, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, said on Wednesday that he would “make sure section 21 goes” and lambasted “unscrupulous landlords” who used it “to intimidate people into either accepting extortionate rent rises or keeping shtoom about the poor standard of their flats”.
The flat is registered to a Channel Islands property holding company, which in turn is owned by the peer and his two sons, Umair and Haider, according to filings registered in Guernsey. Lord Choudrey declares in the Lords’ register of interests that he has multiple “investment properties in London … from which rental income is received”.
Siskos told the Guardian it was contradictory for a Conservative member of the House of Lords to use a section 21 eviction notice while it was government policy to abolish the practice. “He was using the clause to evict me while it is still legal,” he said. “It is obviously legitimate, but it is immoral.”
Theresa May promised in April 2019 to ban no-fault evictions and Boris Johnson repeated the pledge in the Conservatives’ December 2019 election manifesto. Siskos is one of more than 54,000 households in the private rented sector in England had been threatened with a no-fault eviction since the promise was first made.
A representative of the Choudrey family said: “The family would never comment on private matters related to specific individuals, but they always endeavour to treat tenants fairly and to respond to issues in a timely manner – using trusted third-party service providers experienced in market practice and governance.”
They said Lord Choudrey had no involvement in the management of the property.
Siskos alleges his complaints were not addressed by Choudrey’s son Umair, who was the point of contact for the rental. He said a cracked window in 2021 was not fixed for four months and a leak in the roof was not fixed for more than a year after he complained. Mould, which he said affected his health owing to a history of asthma and breathing problems, was not tackled, he said
“I sent texts and emails and they didn’t fix what they had to fix,” Siskos said. “It was costing £1,400 a month, which was an excessive amount, and I expected them to fix these issues.”
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He added: “The temperature in my flat would never exceed 15 degrees during the winter even with the heating on. The second issue was the mould generated in the ceiling of my bedroom, which was eventually caused by a leak from a balcony upstairs. It took months for him to bring an engineer.”
Fourteen months after raising several problems in December 2022, he alerted the environmental health team at the London borough of Barnet, complaining: “I have been chasing a lot.”
The following month, he told the estate agency: “Our landlord is not even responding to our emails and texts.”
He described his treatment as “obviously unfair” and said “there should be compensation and penalties when landlords are so rich and still don’t take actions to fix problems”.
The case comes before a likely parliamentary tussle over new laws governing evictions in the private rented sector, which accommodates 11 million people in England – one in five households. Gove wants to ban no-fault evictions to protect tenants from the fear of being evicted if they complain about conditions. But he also wants to extend powers to evict tenants who behave “antisocially”.
Sixty-eight Conservative MPs – nearly one in five – are private landlords, according to research by the campaign group 38 Degrees.
