Hoogstraten winsbattle for Square

But the 19th Century terraces were to become the unlikely setting for an epic battle between seven tenants and the man once dubbed Britain's most feared landlord.

Spearheading the residents' campaign against tycoon Nicholas Hoogstraten was Oliver Maland, a lawyer who lived in the disputed flats and was determined to recover costs of up to £200,000.

With thousands of pages of documents he walked into Hove County Court on a warm day last June and went head to head against the 56-year-old millionaire.

Yesterday Mr Maland left the court and, in the spitting rain, headed back to the square to break the news of their defeat to the other tenants.

Their case in tatters, they must now pay Mr Hoogstraten's costs, expected to run into tens of thousands of pounds.

Mr Maland was a young barrister when he moved into the square in 1987. It was his first home and, although the building was a little run down, he enjoyed his new life on the coast in the three-bedroom flat.

Four years later, he learned the owner of the flats' freehold, London Residential Properties Plc, had gone into liquidation.

Under Government legislation the tenants had the right to buy the freeholds.

He said: "London Residential had never looked after the place and a lot of the tenants had been mumbling about never getting the managing agents to do anything."

As the tenants prepared to make their offer to buy the freehold, they heard Saga Properties Ltd had also expressed an interest.

A bid of around £120,000 was put in by more than a dozen of the tenants, but in the following weeks they discovered the deal had gone to Saga.

They set up a company, 2 to 6 Palmeira Square Ltd, with Mr Maland as the director, to get the freeholds back and two years of court battles ensued.

Eventually, in December 1994, they got the freeholds they had spent around £80,000 fighting for.

It was the best Christmas present the tenants could have received.

Mr Maland said: "At that stage we were just happy to have the matter ended and would have left it at that.

"We were now, finally, in control of our homes, although in excess of £300,000 worth of work needed doing to them."

In July 1995, they discovered two of the flats, on the ground and first floors, were registered to intermediary landlords, all linked to Mr Hoogstraten.

The result was a high- profile case at Hove County Court where the tenants went head to head with Mr Hoogstraten.

As Mr Maland admits, it was a nerve-wracking moment. At the end of the Sixties, Mr Hoogstraten was jailed for his part in a grenade attack on the home of a Jewish cantor, or synagogue official.

Setting out their case, Graham Campbell said Mr Hoogstraten had thrown away money in a series of "pointless" litigations to punish the residents for daring to take him on.

He said: "It became pointless for Mr Hoogstraten to act in the way he did. He was just throwing money away in a manner calculated to cause us continually to come back to court."

The case ran for days before adjourning and was a dry, humourless business until, on June 30, Mr Hoogstraten took the

stand to deny the charges.

The two days he spent giving evidence was a bad-tempered period punctuated by furious exchanges with Mr Campbell.

While giving evidence, Mr Hoogstraten frequently shouted at the renowned barrister, calling him a "slippery b-----d" an "idiot" and accused him of being "deliberately stupid".

Pacing up and down in the stand, he also dismissed court documents as "a load of crap".

He made no secret of the fact that part of his anger stemmed from the presence of the Press and he was particularly anxious that his various pseudonyms were not read out in open court.

But this did not prevent some being revealed, including Paul Clark, Nicholas Adolf Von Hessen and Nicholas Hamilton, although Judge Suzanne Coates allowed around 20 others to remain a secret between herself and counsel.

It also emerged that Mr Hoogstraten had changed his name to Von Hessen when he moved to Switzerland in 1973. It was not asked if he changed it back.

However, there were times when the media was not present and Mr Hoogstraten relaxed enough to reveal more of his dealings.

The official typed transcripts of the case show he was very sensitive about discussing his link with William Bagot, his mentor who died in 1993, and four of his companies all bearing the name Messina, based in South Africa, the USA, the Caribbean and the British Virgin Islands.

Mr Hoogstraten said: "They (the companies) all have exactly the same name. It was a device, if I can explain a bit further, suggested by offshore trustees some years ago, which would enable the assets to be transferred very easily from one to another without having to pay stamp duties and all those sorts of things.

"It enabled the trustees to move assets around without - in fact, in the case of the South African company, without exchange control even.

"That is not something that would have been said, obviously, if the Press had been here."

When Mr Campbell asked if Mr Hoogstraten had set up the arrangement, he replied: "I did not set it up, no. I acquiesced in it. The suggestion was put to me and I thought, 'marvellous idea'."

Yesterday, Judge Coates was critical both of Mr Hoogstraten's behaviour, and the probity of his witnesses. She also criticised the tenants' failure to check fundamental facts.

She said there was no evidence Mr Hoogstraten had set out to deliberately harm the residents' deal and said much of his, and his associates', involvement was commercially acceptable. She said: "Throughout this case Mr Hoogstraten has come across as aggressive, evasive and downright misleading and I have no doubt that he was involved with Saga. But I have to be satisfied that he was pulling the strings so far as to harm 2 to 6 Palmeira Square Ltd directly."

And this was where the tenants' case collapsed.

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