Owners fight each other over leaky units' compo

Owners of an Auckland leaky building complex are pitted against each other in a scramble for more than $1.3 million of compensation paid out more than a year ago.

A group of residents and former units' owners in the ill-fated Greenwich Park off Symonds St above Spaghetti Junction have been battling members of their own body corporate committee over the money for many months.

Central to the issue is whether owners of the 85-unit complex decide individually or collectively what to do with the settlement of the confidential payout, thought to be worth between $1.3 million and $2 million.

Although the body corporate last year received a confidential amount from unnamed parties, the money has yet to be spent.

In one camp is a group headed by unit owners Dianne Ashleigh and Rex Caulfield who have engaged lawyers to attempt to extract what they see as their portion of the money from their own body corporate.

They want their share of the money to be paid out to them so they can decide how best to spend it.

In the other camp is a larger group of owners who want to keep the money in a common kitty and begin to engage contractors and fix the entire complex. In this group is resident Dean Sutcliffe, who was instrumental in extracting the settlement after engaging leaky building law specialist Paul Grimshaw.

The first camp has sought the legal opinion of barrister Rod Thomas, who told them the body corporate had acted illegally by not disbursing the settlement to individual owners.

He told them they could seek a court order on the disposal of the settlement funds so an equal share of the money could be given to each resident.

He also told them threats from the body corporate that it would raise levies for repair of units which were not common property were illegal.

The group which wants to keep the money in one pool is not keen to discuss the issue in public.

The body corporate committee said via its lawyer, Peter Jones of Christopher Taylor Lawyers, that the matter was still being resolved and would be aired at a meeting of Greenwich Park residents in December.

"The body corporate is continually working with me and other advisers through the many issues that need to be addressed in remediation of the weathertightness problems in the complex and in property disbursement of the settlement fund," Mr Jones said.