JD Wetherspoon wins Van de Berg case

JD Wetherspoon has won its fraud case against its former agent Van de Berg (VdB) and managing director Christian Braun.

Braun's co-directors Richard Harvey and George Aldridge (a chartered surveyor), were also found to have been dishonest in their dealings with JDW on behalf of VdB.

JDW claimed that Braun and VdB, which acted as JDW's outsourced property finding department for many years, had, on a number of occasions, stretching back to the early 1990s, diverted good freehold property deals to third parties rather than bringing them first to JDW as their retainer required.

Instead, they introduced third parties to the freehold and put JDW into a lease at a rent, which increased the value of the freehold for the third party buyer, from whom a separate fee was often sought by VdB.

In one particular example, VdB subsequently arranged for JDW to buy in a freehold from a third party at a price enhanced by its own covenant.

In 1998, Tim Martin, JDW's founder and chairman, became suspicious of some of VdB's dealings, but was given fulsome reassurances of loyalty by Christian Braun, which put him off the scent until suspicions were aroused once more in 2005 and VdB's contract was summarily terminated.

Following a large scale review of VdB's dealings, in late 2006, a fraud action was commenced.

Tim Martin said: "We are delighted by the result. The defendants were dealing with us on the basis of trust and received fees of many millions of pounds over a long period.

"It was astonishingly dishonest and greedy to divert properties to third parties. A lot of people think that anything goes in the property market and this case shows that that's not true."