London developer loses appeal against £500,000 confiscation order

A North London property developer has lost his appeal against a confiscation order of more than £500,000 for defying a council enforcement notice. 

But Boruch Roth was successful in having a fine of £20,000 resulting from the enforcement breach reduced by a third. 

In 2007, Mr Roth obtained planning permission to convert a property he had bought in Haringey into three self-contained flats. 

But he flouted the planning permission and converted into a dozen flats. 

Five years later, Haringey Council issued an enforcement notice, requiring him to stop using the flats by March 2013. 

But when an enforcement officer visited the premises at the end of the year, “no attempts at compliance had been made,” the Court of Appeal said in a decision published this week. 

In May 2017, when an enforcement order returned, the property was “still in use as 12 self-contained flats”. 

When he was prosecuted for defying the order, Mr Roth pleaded guilty in Highbury Magistrates the following month. 

But because a confiscation order was involved, the case was referred to Wood Green Court, where he was fined £20,000 and issued with a confiscation order of £527,887.15. 

The Court of the Appeal said he should have been given credit by the recorder at Wood Green for his guilty plea and reduced the fine to £13,333. 

Mr Roth’s counsel contested the confiscation order on several grounds, arguing that it should have been based on his net profit than the gross income from renting the flats. 

He also said that the original planning permission for three flats should have been taken into account. 

But the Appeal Court upheld the confiscation order over what they described as a “flagrant breach” of the requirements of the enforcement notice.