set judgement aside, urgent help please

[missymoo]

I wonder if anyone can give me some factual help urgently please. We have a court hearing tomorrow to set a judgement aside.

To clarify the situation we are the defendant, we owed money to one of our suppliers (less than £500), we are only a very small business and when my husband was seriously ill last year for 3 months in effect the company stopped trading as he was too ill to work.

The creditor was made aware of this but continued to leave voicemails continually (which obviously we only picked up as one bulk lot) including one from their Director threatening to take us to court and make sure we were shut down and everyone knew what we were like, foolishly I deleted the message as I didn't want my husband to hear it as he wasn't coping with stress well.

When he was able to return to work we decided pretty much straight away that we wanted to change the direction of our business as he was no longer able to do a lot of the things he could before. So within a week of returning to work we went abroad for 10 days to source stock.

Prior to leaving we paid the debt to the company concerned in full. When we returned 2 weeks later we had received court paperwork relating to the debt but as it had been paid in full I just assumed it would be sorted out and did nothing about it, wow what an idiot!!

A judgement was made for £2.50 as outstanding interest at the time of the judgement as they recognised we had paid and £102 costs. The court bailiff could not believe that this was correct and referred it back to the Northampton bulk centre and kept following up on it but was getting nowhere, in the meantime the suppliers put in a letter of complaint to the court saying they wanted the judgement enforced but of course there was now a further £72.25 costs added as well.

Eventually as the court bailiff wasn't getting any response from Northampton she told us we needed to submit an N244 to set the judgement aside. We did this together with an explanation that the debt was paid before we received anything from the court and that we had paid it and gone away. I even sent a copy of the payment from the bank showing the date paid.

We have the date of tomorrow for a hearing to set the judgement aside but earlier this week I have received a letter from the suppliers solicitor saying that we have provided no proof of going away (this is easily rectified but as we did not submit it at the time am I still allowed to take it to the court?), that the paperwork is deemed as being received after the date the debt was paid, so surely that speaks for itself, they also say we have no hope of winning but if we do we have to pay their costs of almost another £500 so drop it all now and just pay the original £104.50 and the further £72.25 to avoid extra cost.

This is blackmail so what I need to know is can I take things like the flight booking details to the court to show we were away and even if we win and have the judgement set aside will we have to pay their £500 costs, in which case we are better just paying the original amount even though it isn't owed.

I'm furious about this but rather than just assume they are correct and give in to blackmail I would like to try and check the facts first.
Thank you for any help

 

[benni]

How late did you pay the original debt? I'm asking because there is a statutory provision under Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 and Late Payment of Commercial Debts Regulations 2002 which means for commercial contracts, unless agreed otherwise, the creditor is automatically after 30 days entitled to interest at 8% over base rate (currently 8.5%) and a one-off penalty of £40.

So the ruling of £2.50 (21 days) interest could well be valid in law and you are racking up a lot of costs that you might end up having to pay. Not sure what the judge will make of it all.

The court bailiff is neither a solicitor or judge so their opinion unfortunately carries no weight...

 

[missymoo]

The amount included interest as the original debt was £407.16 and we paid £453.85, this was also the amount that was shown on the claim form that arrived from the court while we were away. So it should be impossible to claim a further £2.50, obviously the dispute should be whether they are entitled to costs as the debt was paid before we had received anything from the court so we were unaware of any additional charges.

Somebody has informed us that in a small claims court you can't normally recover costs so where they are saying if we go ahead today we will have charges of almost £500, hopefully this is not the case. It is in court at 2pm today so I hope I am doing the right thing by going ahead with this but they really are trying to bully us.

 

[benni]

But interest would continue to accrue until the day the debt was settled, so is there a chance that the interest you already paid doesn't cover every day?

The court fees would normally always be paid by the losing party, but costs of solicitors would normally not be awarded in small claims. In your case I can't see any judge asking you to pay the creditor's solicitor costs if they win as involving a solicitor is completely unnecessary for this kind of case (and the whole reason for the small claims track in the first place).

Also you can bring more evidence to the court, procedure rules are very flexible in small claims court.

 

[missymoo]

thank you that is very helpful, fingers crossed