urgent advice needed....desperate

memebaby

this is such a long story i cant even start but suffice to say weve got lots of debts from my partnners business which has been doing really badly. Ive worked really really hard negotiating with all the creditors on my own with some success but ive had an awful exprience today which reduced mw to tears and im just so unsure.

one of our creditors issued a statutory demand for 1600. fair enough, we owe it, i tried to negotiate with the solicitors to agree a payment plan but they refused and said they were going to proceed and make us bankrupt, something that i had fought so hard to avoid. i therefor upped our offer which was totally unrealistic but desperate times...etc. I asked to pay 500 frothwith and i would clear the balance within 28days. a fair offer i thought. the sol, who seemed to have a verty aggressive approach said he wasnt goint to agree anything but if we were going to borrow some money to pay 500 we should get on wth it (!) and pay it over as a measure of good will. mmmmmm. Anyway i scraped and scraped and schemed and found the 500 and paid it cash into their account and again asked for 28 days to pay balance. he emailed back a really snotty reply saying 2 1/2 weeks was long enough to sort our affairs out and not only did he now want the balance of the debt he wanted the interest claimed under the statutory demand ( fair enough i guess) and he now wanted another 400 costs, which he was not going to discuss so our 1600 debt was now stood at 2100 even with us having paid over 500. i just didnt get the figures and couldnt understand where the costs had suddenly appeared from, hed never mentioned them before. it just seemed really really sneeky. my copy of the stat demand was at the accountants so i decided to phone the said solicitor and ask him if he wouldnt mind reading out the figures from the stat demand so i could see whether the interest added up and whether there was any claim for costs in there. i cant even begin to tell you howe he spoke to me, he shouted said things like "i dont need to help you people" "i dont have to tell you anything, get your own solicitor" and kept shouting at me and was just so aggressive and rude.during his rant he did say something about not being able to claim any costs under the statutory demand so unless i paid the costs they would issue anyway even if i was prepared to pay the original debt.,I asked him if he would tell me the name of the senior partner who deals with complaints and he said "look on the letter headed paper" he then said "in fact i revoke my ooriginal offer, there is no offer and im going to issue because i have the power to make that decision. he then put the phone down on me. I was not rude, i am softly spoken and very polite. the abuse just came out of nowhere. he talked to me lke i was s...t on his shoe which lets face it when your in debt and trying to sort things out you generaly feel like on a daily basis anyway !!!!!!! ive lodged an immediate complaint with both the senior partner tha tdeals with complaints and also thesenior partner that heads his dept because i just dont think you can do that but guess what.......no one got back to me today. ive put my complaint i writing and emailed it over.

my question ... after all that (PHEW) sorry but ive been so upset all day.....is can they insist you pay their costs for issuing a stat demand if there is no power to claim it on the stat demand and if not can he petiton us for bankruptcy becasue presumably then he can ask for a load of costs within those proceedings even when we are offering to pay the debt. i feel like hes been really underhand and now hes almost saying he wont let us pay the debt. please help me.i dont know what to do. has anyone experience of this

thanks for reading this long post. im gutted today.

nootiful

Bumped to top (I can't help but surely someone can)

philnicandamy

double post

more answers here

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1149787