MetroPM Arvostelua 

DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY.

Let me start this review by saying I am a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW) and in my near 30 year professional career, I have never come across someone as dishonest as Matthew Arnold (MA), the owner and Managing Director of this company, MetroPM. These are my reasons.

I was a volunteer Director of the freehold company that owns the apartment block in Edgbaston Birmingham where I live. I noticed the amount we had paid for the gardeners on our site, for the previous 2 year period, was approximately double our contracted rate. MA told us it was for legitimate extras. I doubted this could be the case so requested copies of the actual invoices. It took nearly 3 months and repeated requests before MA finally forwarded these to me.

It was clear, to both me and one of my fellow Directors (one with considerable business experience) and others we showed them too, that almost every invoice for the previous two years had been “padded” with extras that either had not been carried out or were already included in our contract. Every invoice was approved for payment by MA. We concluded it was serious enough to report it to the authorities as suspected fraud. On challenging MA he said that other than forgetting to reduce the standard contracted rate from one year to the next, there was nothing else wrong with the invoices.

However, I later uncovered evidence, in an email from MA to the gardeners, sent many months BEFORE my inspection of these invoices, that he was already talking to them about “the charges levied without agreement” & “these specific charges which are perpetual, unapproved and probably not correct” & “I can't believe for example that so much time and cost was incurred in cutting hedges on a monthly basis when this formed part of the standard contract in the first place”. It seems clear that MA knew far more than he was letting on.

He later contacted the gardeners saying “it seems to me that works have been invoiced from month to month in identical form, regardless of whether that scheduled work has actually been carried out” & “These outstanding issues are placing my company at risk”. MA has NEVER admitted any of this to our leaseholders, this was discovered by chance in an email between him and the gardeners. Our development has not received ONE PENNY back into our bank account to reimburse us for these overcharges.

I have also uncovered evidence that this was happening on a number of developments, all managed by MA and using the same gardeners.

The dishonesty does not stop there. MA was also employed as Company Secretary of our development, and in that role he sent out documents to our leaseholders full of lies about me, resulting in an EGM which removed me as a Director and so stopped me investigating any further. These lies were so damaging I had neighbours heckling me, snubbing me and closing their door in my face. My only recourse was to bring a defamation lawsuit against MA. This was a success and forced him to pay me substantial damages for his lies.

Also, during the EGM process, I and one of my fellow Directors asked for a copy of our Register of Members so we could contact leaseholders ourselves. Contrary to UK Company Law, MA refused to hand it over. MA eventually sent a copy to us where he had changed the contact details to make it impossible for us as Directors to even contact our own shareholders.

To doctor the Register of Members of a Company is a CRIMINAL offence. To cover up a fraud is a CRIMINAL offence.

We are still waiting for Action Fraud to investigate so I would urge any leaseholders who have experienced similar issues on other developments to come forward and report their suspicions to Action Fraud and RICS.

I'll finish where I started – DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY