19th September 2026

Sheila Oliver

Dedication

To local historian Ray Preston, who tried so hard for Offerton.

Also by this Author

Vexatious? Moi? (Book One): Harcourt Street

Vexatious? Moi? (Book Two): Padden Brook

Vexatious? Moi? (Book Three): The Bent Bypass

Vexatious? Moi? (Book Four): Sandringham Road

Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport)

Chapter One: A Precinct Left to Rot

By Easter 2012, when this author photographed it, Offerton Shopping Precinct had been owned by Tenbest Limited since the 1990s — and had, over that time, been allowed to slide into a state of serious disrepair. Broken shopfronts, neglected fabric, a site plainly not being looked after by an owner with any apparent interest in its upkeep.

It would be easy to assume such neglect was simply carelessness. The truth, as this book sets out, looks rather more deliberate: a precinct run down long enough, and hard enough, that compulsory purchase and redevelopment came to look not like a last resort, but like the plan all along.

Chapter Two: Who Actually Owns Offerton Precinct?

Tenbest Limited, incorporated on 27 March 1996, sits at the near end of a long and deliberately tangled corporate chain. Behind it: Citylake Investments Ltd (1978), whose sole shareholder is Wickpoint Ltd; Agra Ltd (1983), with eleven shareholders; Strongpark Ltd (2007), wholly owned by Agra; and Landmaster Properties Ltd (1997), whose sole named shareholder is Salomon Noe, and which alone controls nineteen subsidiaries, with reported assets of roughly £114.8 million set against liabilities of some £730.7 million.

Beneath Landmaster sits a very long tail of small, single-purpose subsidiary companies, many named after specific shop addresses scattered across the UK — a good number of them showing minimal capital, no group companies of their own, and no discoverable website. Individually, none of this proves anything. Collectively, it is the corporate architecture of a company that does not especially want to be looked at closely.

Named individuals connected to a cluster of these companies — Kewbridge Ltd, Headstates Ltd, Hillington Ltd, Iverlex Ltd, Nextbourne Ltd — include Etelka Noe, Philip Noe, Salomon Noe (81, British), Leopold Noe, and a trust named for a further family member. Also named in the records: Charles Lerner and Mark Cymerman of Marcus King & Co LLP. A separate connected entity, the Chedva Charitable Trust, also appears in the picture.

The registered address for many of these companies is a small lock-up shop, reached through a tiny side door, in North London — a striking contrast with the considerably grander premises the group’s auditors, Venitt and Greaves, present on their own website.

This author does not claim to have proven wrongdoing here. What she has are pointed, unanswered questions: why investment properties in the accounts show no depreciation at historic versus market value; why staff costs and directors’ remuneration are absent from some of the filings; how RBS came to lend the group tens of millions of pounds; and what a suspiciously round £500,000 entry for “other operating income” in the 2009 accounts actually represents. Stockport Council, in choosing Tenbest as its partner for this site, chose to ask none of these questions either.

Chapter Three: The Garage That Fought Back

Lisburne Garage had traded successfully on the Precinct for twenty-five years when its owners were told their premises would be compulsorily purchased and handed to the Precinct’s owners for redevelopment.

Rather than accept this quietly, the garage’s owners — trading as the Lisburne Group — put forward their own, consultation-led redevelopment scheme. Local people backed it: they wanted to keep the Indian restaurant, the pharmacy, the convenience store, the vets — the actual fabric of a working local centre — and did not want a very large store, nor more housing, imposed on top of it. The application drew over four hundred objections when it eventually came before the planning committee.

The Council was not interested. It insisted on a large store instead, for which, this author notes, no end-user ever actually materialised at the time the insistence was made.

What this author discovered much later, buried in the CPO documents themselves, puts the Lisburne Group’s treatment in a considerably darker light. A covenant exists on the Precinct land at Amlwch Avenue expressly prohibiting the erection of detached or semi-detached private dwellings, blocks of flats, or any building for residential use only. In other words: the Council’s planning department and committee appear to have let the Lisburne Group spend years, and thousands of pounds, on surveys and consultants for a scheme that — because it touched on residential use — could very possibly never have been permitted in the first place, before finally refusing it.

Somewhere else in the Council’s own public statements sits the claim that “the owners of the Precinct have long had a planning permission to build housing on the site.” Reconciling that claim with a covenant expressly forbidding residential-only buildings on the same land is, this author admits, beyond her. One of the two statements is simply not true.

A property professional this author spoke to, while purchasing an Ordnance Survey map, put the pattern rather more bluntly: when a council doesn’t want a scheme to go ahead, it demands ever more expensive reports and keeps moving the goalposts until the applicant’s money runs out. The Lisburne Group, to their credit, did not give up quietly — this was about more than money or lost business to them, which is precisely why they went to the local community to ask what people actually wanted to see on the site. They did not have to do that. The Council did not extend them the same courtesy in return.

Chapter Four: An Interview “Sent” Under Caution

A Freedom of Information response (ref FOI 6106, received 21 September 2012) sets out the Council’s own account of a decade spent “approaching” Tenbest about the Precinct’s condition. It confirms that a notice under section 59 of the Environmental Protection Act was served on 22 March 2011, and that the owners were sent “a written interview under caution” on 14 November 2011.

Quite how an interview is conducted by post, this author leaves to the reader’s imagination.

Planning Enforcement separately wrote — the FOI response does not say precisely when — under section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act, listing required improvements. What those improvements actually were, and whether Tenbest ever carried them out, the Council’s response does not say. Meanwhile, and apparently without any sense of contradiction, the Council was pursuing redevelopment through negotiation with the very same owners it was formally cautioning.

This author’s own contemporaneous note on receiving that response was blunt: given what she knew of the owners’ “methods and morality (in court),” including a complete disregard for the law demonstrated in litigation elsewhere, she suspected they were deliberately delaying while quietly working on their own exit strategy. Her verdict, in a single word: “Beware!”

Open questions this author has put, without a satisfactory answer: what the section 215 list actually specified; which councillors were involved in the Tenbest negotiations, and how often; and what the Council’s financial exposure would have been if there had been “no deal” by December 2012.

Chapter Five: The CPO Machinery

The Council’s Executive Meeting of 20 August 2012 tells its own story. The agenda recommended approving Tenbest’s request to vary its Development Agreement — the detail of which was, conveniently, confined to a confidential appendix. It further recommended that, if Tenbest could not comply with the revised terms by the end of November 2012, officers and executive councillors be authorised to proceed to a General Vesting Declaration — the mechanism for compulsory purchase — by 12 December 2012.

Any interim costs of that CPO process were to be funded through prudential borrowing, secured against the future capital receipt expected from disposing of the site. Roger Hannah and Co were appointed as the Council’s CPO valuers.

This author has repeatedly asked, and repeatedly not been answered: why Tenbest was made preferred developer at all, given the state of the site; what financial or legitimacy checks Steve Burns, the Council’s Head of Planning, actually made on the company, given that she and others raised concerns with him directly; what role Council Solicitor Barry Khan played in the process; and, ultimately, how much the Council was prepared to pay Tenbest through the CPO it was simultaneously threatening them with.

A council apparently unable to get its own preferred developer to maintain a shop front seems an odd one to trust with the far larger sums involved in buying that developer out.

Chapter Six: A Council That Knew What It Was Signing

On 25 February 2009, Stockport Council entered into an agreement with Tenbest — by then the Precinct’s major landowner, and, this author notes, a company associated with something in the order of a hundred other companies. Nobody at the Council appears to have asked why.

The original CPO process had actually begun in March 2010, with a statutory window: it had to be exercised by March 2012, or its powers would lapse entirely. That deadline explains the sudden urgency behind the General Vesting Declaration machinery described in the previous chapter, and the rush to reach agreement with Tenbest by December 2012 — years after the Council first decided, back in 2009, to proceed with both Tenbest and a compulsory purchase order, and years after Tenbest had proven unable to produce an occupier at a price that would let the scheme proceed at all.

By June 2012, Tenbest said it finally had an agreement with a supermarket — but the price of that agreement was a further round of variations to the terms, including a cap fixed by Tenbest itself, and backed by its own independent valuation advice, on how much Tenbest would have to pay toward the CPO acquisition costs. The risk, in other words, sat with the Council.

Three options were, on the Council’s own analysis, actually available: modify the development agreement again (which is what happened); press ahead alone with the General Vesting Declaration, acquiring every interest in the site — including Tenbest’s own — entirely at the Council’s risk; or simply let the CPO powers lapse and walk away. This author’s own, consistently held view was and remains that the third option was always the sensible one. Instead, the Executive approved the first.

There is a wider pattern here worth naming. A number of jurisdictions have moved to regularise situations where companies share the same directors and the same individual shareholders, yet are structured so as not to be legally regarded as a single “group” — thereby keeping each entity out of the common liability that would otherwise follow if one of them failed. This is, typically, how family property businesses like the Tenbest/Landmaster/Agra group are built. It should not have taken a campaigning journalist to notice.

Chapter Seven: What the Council Told Me, and What It Didn’t

This author submitted a Freedom of Information request asking the Council directly whether it had any plans for the purchase of the Offerton site. The answer came back a clear, simple no.

It later transpired that a General Vesting Declaration — the formal legal mechanism by which a council acquires every interest in a site under a compulsory purchase order — had already been signed on 14 January 2012, at very much the time that “no” was being written to her. If serving a General Vesting Declaration is not a plan for purchase, this author does not know what would qualify.

The obvious question is whether the officer who answered her FOI request ever thought to ask Council Solicitor Barry Khan, who was — at that exact moment — arranging the very same General Vesting Declaration on the Council’s behalf. Either the FOI team genuinely didn’t know what its own Solicitor was doing, which raises its own questions about how the Council manages information internally, or it did know, and answered anyway.

Either way, this sits alongside the Council’s wider FOI record — a record already, in this author’s words, “badly holed below the waterline” by its handling of requests over the Harcourt Street contamination affair. Here, again, are Council panjandrums quick to reach for the word “vexatious” whenever an inconvenient question is asked, while apparently unable to give a straight answer to a perfectly simple one.

A follow-up response, dated 5 March 2013 and given on behalf of Stepping Hill Area Committee, at least conceded something: the Council “regrets the amount of time it has taken to bring forward the comprehensive regeneration of the Offerton Precinct,” while insisting it was “not expecting to bear any capital costs” — a claim sitting rather awkwardly alongside the risk-laden CPO arrangements described in the previous chapter — though it did, at least, admit “some element of risk” existed, and that it had “considered these risks carefully.”

Regret is easily given. An honest account of what those risks actually were, and who signed the Council up to them, has proven much harder to extract.

Chapter Eight: A Warning From the Courts

The Council might have done well, before entering into any of this, to read a judgment handed down in October 2010 by Miss Geraldine Andrews QC, sitting in the Chancery Division of the High Court in Birmingham.

The case, Ausman Ramzan v Brookwide Ltd, concerned a restaurant leased from 1989 and later purchased freehold in 1992. In 1999, employees of Brookwide Ltd — a wholly owned subsidiary of AGRA, the same corporate group that sits within Tenbest’s own ownership chain — demolished and then bricked up an adjoining wall, cut off the property’s fire escape, and destroyed its fire alarm. The restaurant could no longer function. What followed was ten years of litigation, marked, in the judge’s own assessment, by confusion over ownership, delay, and what she plainly regarded as deliberate obstruction — remarking that she would have used her discretion to join a further claim by the claimant’s son, “had further tricks and procedures been allowed to defeat an otherwise meritorious case.”

The damages ultimately awarded cost Brookwide roughly a year’s profits — some £360,000 — before costs were even added. The Ramzans, the judge noted, would not have pursued litigation on this scale lightly.

If Stockport Council intended to take on the Tenbest/Landmaster/AGRA group over Offerton Precinct, it needed to go in with its eyes open, and the resources to match an opponent with this kind of track record. On the evidence of this book so far, it did neither.

Chapter Nine: The Bill Comes Due

An Executive Meeting agenda item from 12 August 2014 shows exactly how prescient the previous chapter’s warning was. Possession of the site had finally taken place on 1 July 2013 — a year earlier — and compensation payments to affected parties had already begun flowing. The Council’s hope was that these costs would be covered by an indemnity from Tenbest; anything beyond that would be met through Directly Funded Borrowing, which is to say, by Stockport’s council taxpayers.

By the time of this report, negotiations over the actual amount of compensation were still ongoing, with no substantive progress made in the first quarter of the 2014/15 financial year. The Council conceded it was unlikely negotiations would conclude in the short term, though it still hoped to finish them within that financial year.

Two years after the “urgent” General Vesting Declaration machinery described in Chapter Six, then, the Council was still haggling over the bill — with a group whose own subsidiary had, on the evidence of a High Court judge, spent a decade running exactly this kind of delay in a dispute of its own.

Chapter Ten: “Good News for Offerton”

The Stockport Express duly reported the next step: a CPO issued against Tenbest for the Precinct land — Lisburne Lane, Amhurst Avenue, Half Moon Lane — with the Council hoping to bring in a new Aldi supermarket. At a Stepping Hill Area Committee meeting, resident Tony Fisher asked for an update on the legal procedures; the Council’s own report said only that it was “working with” Tenbest and Aldi to agree a start date, while continuing to press the owners and occupiers to keep the Precinct safe and secure.

Aldi’s scheme, put forward the previous year after public consultation, promised up to twenty-five full- and part-time jobs, a garage/repair workshop, a store of 1,419 square metres, 103 parking spaces and landscaping. Councillor Iain Roberts, Executive Member for Economic Development and Regeneration, called it “good news for Offerton,” saying it would “improve the local centre and create jobs for local people.”

Readers of the earlier books in this series will recognise the shape of that sentence. It is, almost word for word, the language used to sell Harcourt Street, Padden Brook and the A555. It was not true in any of those cases either.

My final sentence – I do actually feel that Aldi has been good for Offerton.

Chapter Eleven: A Question Not Wanted

This author put a public question to Democratic Services, addressed — pointedly — to everyone on the relevant committee except its “excellent Labour and Conservative members”: did they regret having scuppered the Lisburne Group’s proposal, which could have been built years earlier, in favour of Tenbest, who had by then left the Precinct in this sorry state? And how much was the compulsory purchase process and compensation likely to cost Stockport’s council taxpayers?

Like Donald Rumsfeld, this author notes, she did not ask the question the Council wanted to answer.

The local press, over the years, told its own version of the same story, in headlines this author has collected without much need for further comment: “Run-down precinct remains an eyesore.” “Business boost as mall takes shape” — a claim she met with the simple observation, “Yeah, right! What a joke this Council is.” “Cabbies in fear for their future,” about the taxi trade connected to the site, who at least “showed they wouldn’t be pushed around.” “Only the lonely — council nets few.” No comment necessary. And “More lost info leads to anger,” to which this author’s verdict was simply: “I blame the management.”

Chapter Twelve: The Case Officer Who Wasn’t There

Planning application DC/044143 — sometimes written DC044143 — concerns a renewal of an earlier outline permission (DC/028270) for demolition of the existing buildings and regeneration of the site to provide a neighbourhood food store, retail unit, pharmacy and restaurant. It was received on 22 March 2010, validated the next day, and granted, with the decision notice issued on 24 January 2011.

That decision notice — the only document listed against the application on Stockport’s own planning portal — currently returns “Document Unavailable.” A 404, for a formal planning decision affecting a whole neighbourhood centre.

More striking still: the portal’s public summary lists the Case Officer for this application as “Not Available.” No named planning officer appears anywhere in the online summary, contacts, or related public records. This author had suspected Dominic Harvey — by now a familiar name in this series — might have handled it, but has found nothing to corroborate that. A different officer, Jane Chase, was active on similar applications in the Stepping Hill/Offerton area around the same period, but no confirmed link to this specific application has been found either.

A major regeneration decision, then, with no retrievable decision notice and, officially, no one who made it.