Gary Fixter: urged by a judge to ‘give up being a landlord’

Gary Fixter has a record of persistently operating as a rogue landlord. Between 2016 and 2018 he failed to act on repeated warnings to improve the standard of his properties, despite collecting £100,000 a year in rent and earning a salary of £94,000 a year as an IT consultant.

He amassed eight convictions for renting out substandard shared houses in Birkenhead last year. He was ordered to pay more than £45,000 in fines and costs at Liverpool magistrates court in April after failing to repair “appalling” housing for two years. Residents in three properties in Birkenhead and West Kirby were repeatedly left in “shocking” conditions, often without heating, water supplies or fire alarms.

One property, where a 10-year-old child had lived for eight years, had a hole in the bathroom through which pigeon droppings fell. The court heard that repairs would have cost Fixter £13,000.

Fixter, 36, pleaded guilty to 45 offences between 2016 and 2018 but told the court that he was “not a rich man” and owned a “modest portfolio” of six properties, in which he said he had only accumulated equity worth £105,000 – equivalent to around a year’s rental income from the flats.

District judge Wendy Lloyd told the court that the housing conditions were “shocking” and urged Fixter to “give up being a landlord”.

Inside one of Gary Fixter’s properties in Scarborough. Photograph: Supplied

She added: “It’s a depressing case. The fact that people have to live like this is totally and utterly unacceptable … What a disgraceful state of affairs in a modern society.”

Fixter blamed “shoddy” builders, an “obstructive tenant” and the fact that his mother was ill and later died, as reasons he could not carry out the work.

Fixter had been convicted in 2016 for similar offences at properties he owned in Scarborough, where he was ordered to pay £42,000.

During that case he was described as “despicable” by a local councillor, after being found guilty of 18 offences, including some relating to his failure to adequately maintain the electrics within the building and allow dangerous live wires to be exposed in the common areas, which could have resulted in the death or serious injury of his tenants.

Fixter has since sold his properties in Yorkshire and some of those that he owned in Wirral. He did not respond to invitations to comment.

Adrian Webb: former firefighter who breached fire regulations

Adrian Webb outside Liverpool magistrates court. Photograph: Andrew Teebay/Liverpool Echo

Webb, 54, is a former firefighter who has been convicted of renting out a Liverpool property that breached fire regulations in 2016, in addition to other prosecutions that mark him out as a regular offender.

He failed Liverpool city council’s “fit and proper” person test after being convicted in 2015 for renting flats in breach of prohibition orders, which resulted in Webb and his wife, Lynn, being fined £16,000 for letting the dangerous property.

In May 2016 Webb was fined again, this time for a further £60,000 after renting the same property before the urgent repairs were completed. The new residents had no heating, fire alarms or fire resistant doors, and the ceiling collapsed. The judge described the offences as “absolutely disgraceful”.

In July 2016, Webb was convicted by St Helens council over conditions at another of his rental properties, where council records show he was fined £4,000 and made to pay costs and a victim surcharge. He has continued to let in St Helens.

Webb, whose family home is a Merseyside property bought for £835,000 in 2007, told the Guardian: “I formally request that you do not bring myself and family any more upset on this matter by reporting this. I was a victim of circumstances and it has caused me much hardship in many ways. I am trying to put this behind me.”

David McGuinness: ‘tends to go for the lower end of the market’

McGuinness is one of the 28 landlords that the London borough of Newham says it has banned. He failed the local authority’s fit and proper person test in 2013 when he applied for a licence to act as a private landlord. As Newham has a licensing scheme that covers almost all of the borough, it effectively means he is not permitted to act as a landlord inside Newham’s boundaries.

He is known to Newham officials as someone who “tends to go for the lower end of the market” and has rented out a shed as somebody’s home for £350 a month, a property that was raided with live wires spilling out from the mains electrical unit, and another infested with rats.

The council has identified 48 McGuinness properties inside the local authority, although his portfolio is not restricted to Newham. For example, he owns property in Ilford which is licensed by the London borough of Redbridge, allowing it to be rented out by a third-party agent.

McGuinness did not respond to invitations to comment.

Katia Goremsandu: handed a criminal behaviour order

Katia Goresmsandu Photograph: Guardian/EHN

Last year Katia Goremsandu, 57, was banned from managing property in the London boroughs of Westminster and Haringey for 10 years under a landmark court order handed out because of the dangerous condition of homes she rented out.

She was handed a criminal behaviour order – usually used to control gang members or prolific drug offenders – in February 2017 after a prosecution by Westminster council for failing to comply with an improvement order, which resulted in her being convicted.

Goremsandu was the “country’s worst landlord” in 2015 – after being convicted of property offences seven times – but has argued she was the victim.

She claimed her local council had persecuted her, and said her rental flats had been vandalised by tenants envious of her property wealth. She told the Guardian: “The mentality of a homeless person or the person who doesn’t have work or a property is ‘why should [the landlord] have [a property] and I don’t?’. And they bash it, they break it. It is a well-known fact. It is a state of mind. They punish you for being a landlord.”

A spokeswoman for Haringey council said Goremsandu’s criminal behaviour order came after “numerous prosecutions for a range of housing offences … over a period of four years”.

Company records list Goremsandu’s address as an apartment in a handsome Georgian villa in Bayswater, west London. She also owns a luxury property in Kensington, west London, which is currently occupied.

In 2014 she was prosecuted for putting tenants at risk by covering a warning light on a faulty fire alarm with a black sticker in a house converted into seven flats in Tottenham.

In 2015, when she first started to become known to the wider public, Haringey council estimated that Goremsandu’s rental income was around £188,000 a year, including housing benefit payments. The council prosecuted her once again in 2016 for a licensing offence.

Last year, separate to the criminal behaviour order, she was prosecuted twice more by Haringey for offences under the Housing Act, according to responses to freedom of information requests made by the Guardian and ITV News.

The exact scope of Goremsandu’s property portfolio is unknown, but the Guardian and ITV News have established that she continues to own London properties that are being rented out to tenants, which she is permitted to do in boroughs other than Haringey or by using third party letting agents.

Goremsandu did not respond to invitations to comment.

Being barred as a landlord does not mean that all or any of the landlord’s properties are substandard.