A tale of angry Gardeners and shit-fairies.

When you are considered wealthy and famous there will always be some dishonest people who want to take advantage of you.

I learned a long time ago how to shield myself against dishonest people. We work with a property management company and have a property manager to deal with contractors. I keep my interactions with people who work at our property to a bare minimum.

But then stuff like this happens:

I’ll keep it as simple as possible.

We had a gardening contractor (Innes) on a 2 week trial who did a substandard job. We didn’t extend the trial and told him via email in Sept 2023 that we found another gardening contractor (Mike) who “offered to do the job for $50 per hour”.

Innes Kensington is one of the two anonymous sources in the NZ Herald story. Innes lost his contract to Mike “who undercut his price” but is now ironically working with him to blackmail us. Innes claims he had “several issues with payment”. He is wrong.

Here’s the invoice from Innes from Sept 1, 2023:

Here is the payment confirmation to his company from Sept 13, 2023:

Mike Hawthorne started as a gardening contractor after Innes Kensington left. Mike was offered $50 per hour like our previous gardeners before Innes. Mike agreed to that rate.

After Mike was told that we don’t require his services anymore he emailed us his first invoice with a much higher hourly rate and explained his overcharge by claiming to have done some “research” about what would be a fair rate. He went on to say “I’m at the top end of pricing but I hope you see the value.”

Here’s the email from Mike on Dec 7, 2023:

We refused to pay his “top end pricing” which was never mentioned before he started work in our gardens. We insisted to pay the agreed price of $50 per hour. Mike turned hostile and blasted my phone with messages.

Have a look:

You can be the judge.

Mike told the NZ Herald that he is owed $35,000. He is wrong. He has already been paid $24,397 back in March. See screenshot:

When Mike realized that his claim of being owed $35,000 was false he emailed us another 6 invoices just hours after we received the request for comment from the NZ Herald. See screenshot:

Mike’s final invoice of $28,000 was emailed to us on Sept 16, 2024, only a month ago. After removing his overcharge he is owed $14,700. He threatened legal action and blackmail through the media. Our lawyers are dealing with it.

Mike is dishonest and he broke the law with his insults and threats of blackmail. He’s a terrible gardener. He could have used the bathroom at our staff house (5 mins drive) but instead dug holes in our gardens and used them as toilets.

We always pay our contractors for good and honest work. We always treat people working at our property with respect and we don’t give an inch to liars and bullies.