Fletcher has now sought a court order that Mani must pay his debt with the company as previously agreed.<\/p>\n
While Mani accepted there were outstanding invoices for the amount Fletcher claimed, he said he should not have to pay it because a Fletcher employee had told him the guarantee was limited to $100,000. <\/p>\n
According to his affidavit, Mani said when he opened the account, the employee told him the guarantee was needed in order for it to be opened.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was assured by [the employee] at the time I signed the personal guarantee this would never be relied on or enforced by the plaintiff. Further, I was assured by [the employee] at all times that the guarantee was strictly limited to the sum of $100,000,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Associate Judge Grant Brittain rejected this claim, saying Mani entered into the guarantee \u201cfreely and voluntarily\u201d, and that it explicitly did not put a limit on what he was liable for.<\/p>\n
He said the claim Mani was told the guarantee would never be relied on was \u201csimply not credible\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no reasonable commercial justification for an employee to make that type of representation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mani also claimed some of the product supplied by Fletcher was defective, costing him $9000 in remedial work as of November, and that some houses might need recladding because of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are bare assertions. No supporting evidence is provided. Eco-Smart is in liquidation and there is no evidence that the liquidator is involved. Mr Mani does not say which entity might have a liability to carry out repair work or give any details of the issues that he alludes to,\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n
Judge Brittain ordered Mani pay the outstanding amount, with 18% interest, as well as Fletcher\u2019s solicitor and client costs, which were still to be determined.<\/p>\n
Ritesh Mani\u2019s chequered commercial past<\/p>\n
Mani was bankrupted in 2002 and again 2014. In 2015, he was working for Tribeca Homes as its \u201cnumber one sales executive\u201d when the company folded, leaving customers in the lurch.<\/p>\n
Tribeca went into liquidation<\/a> owing creditors $4.8m, with about half being unpaid taxes. A Herald investigation into Tribeca<\/a> found Mani \u2013 who was then prohibited from managing or directing a company due to bankruptcy restrictions \u2013 had flown Tribeca salespeople to Australia to attend a pep talk by Jordan Belfort, the convicted fraudster known for his memoir The Wolf of Wall Street.<\/p>\n Liquidators later pursued claims against a Mani family trust for $133,023. The Registrar of Companies later imposed a three-and-a-half-year banning order against Mani, but this order was quashed on appeal, with a judge ruling the Companies Office had provided insufficient evidence detailing Mani\u2019s involvement in mismanagement at Tribeca.<\/p>\n He went on to start Eco-Smart Group, attracting complaints in the press from clients and in the courts from subcontractors.<\/p>\n He eventually ceased trading, saying he had left the real estate sector after five companies in his group entered liquidation.<\/p>\n Mani, when contacted by the Herald, declined at the time to directly answer questions about the collapse of Eco-Smart and instead directed that communications be managed by a public-relations firm.<\/p>\n A statement from the firm attributed the failure to subcontractors and the declining Auckland property market.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have worked with hundreds of happy homeowners over the years, but the issues noted above meant not everyone had a great experience. We did our best to complete all the projects and get everyone into their homes before the liquidation,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a difficult decision made to then close the company.\u201d<\/p>\n Mani said in his PR statement he was not concerned the collapse of Eco-Smart might expose him to a third bankruptcy.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are doing our best to work through this as positively as possible for all concerned.\u201d<\/p>\n Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice, and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 12 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fletcher has now sought a court order that Mani must pay his debt with the company as previously…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[128306,74,51,1558,138,1349,29414,12513,42,700,101,117743,300,130,9097,43,19719,6848,26692,2744,128308,814,128305,52095,29747,131,61,40,38,41,39,128307,12806],"class_list":["post-211067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-128306","tag-after","tag-auckland","tag-been","tag-business","tag-court","tag-developer","tag-failed","tag-headlines","tag-latest","tag-left","tag-mani","tag-money","tag-more","tag-must","tag-news","tag-ordered","tag-orders","tag-owing","tag-pay","tag-personally","tag-property","tag-ritesh","tag-supplier","tag-suppliers","tag-than","tag-to","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-twicebankrupted","tag-venture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Parts of Eco-Smart Homes, which developed residential property across Auckland \u2013 including this strip of townhouses in Helensville \u2013 have gone into liquidation, with director Ritesh Mani telling the Herald he has stopped trading. Photo \/ Alex Burton<\/p>\n