Conor O’Dywer
A scandal involving a leading property developer in Cyprus may have the potential to shake to the core the credibility of the holiday homes market on the island, following allegations supported by video evidence, contracts and audio evidence that a property developer in Paralimini sold a plot of land to Conor O’Dwyer in 2005 for £163,000 and then resold a house designed for Conor O’Dwyer’s family to another buyer Michelle McDonald, without the knowledge of O’Dwyer. The plot thickens with the apparent collusion of local law firms in Paralimini who according to O’Dwyer have conspired to cover up the fraud.This has inspired Conor O’Dwyer to setup a website www.lyingbuilder.com which is his own crusade to expose what he sees is the injustice and illegality of the whole situation.The Cypriot market is already experiencing turbulent times, with the storm clouds already on the horizon with major developments experiencing problems selling units. Such scandals which are now making the headlines in the UK will severely undermine property sales in Cyprus.News organisations in Cyprus and the UK have been monitoring the story looking at the way in which British buyers like Conor O’Dwyer who in good faith purchase land from developers like Karayiannas are allegedly defrauded, in the belief that they own the property. But in fact the developer resells to another buyer.Other examples are now surfacing of Brits buying from Cypriot developers and are either finding the property is not built to standard or the title deeds are not given.
London Greek News has posted the various videos by Conor O’Dwyer, who has made several allegations with court cases pending in the Cypriot legal process. We will post news as and when they appear.
From the The London Greek News 18th November, 2007
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008A BRITISH property buyer was hospitalised for two days on Monday after allegedly being badly beaten by the developers with whom he is in dispute, his lawyer said yesterday. Conor O’Dwyer, 38, who has widely publicised his case on youtube and on the website lyingbuilder.com, was kicked in the kidneys and had his head stomped on, according to his lawyer Yiannos Georgiades.O’Dwyer had already pressed charges over another alleged beating by the father and son developers in March 2006 while fighting his ongoing property case at court. They were later charged over the assault.
According to Georgiades, on Monday at around 11am O’Dwyer went to the disputed property in the Famagusta district to take pictures of changes to the area around the house to produce as evidence in the land wrangle.
“He thought the photos might prove important later,” said Georgiades.
Upon his arrival, the woman to whom the developers re-sold the house after unilaterally cancelling O’Dwyer’s contract and keeping £75,000 of his money, allegedly “made a phone call” and two men appeared shortly afterwards that O’Dwyer identified as the developers.
“Conor was forced out of his car. One stepped on his head and the other kicked him in the kidneys,” said Georgiades, adding that they also took his camera.
“He was bleeding and there was a crowd of mostly women screaming and shouting for them to stop. He was crying out for help and no one helped him.”
Georgiades said someone eventually called 112 and police showed up with an ambulance. A British woman also took pictures of what was going on, he said.
O’Dwyer was taken to Paralimni hospital and from there sent to Larnaca.
“He has head injuries, external bruising, internal pain in the kidney region and he is badly shaken,” said Georgiades.
Doctors decided to keep him in until today to run tests and X-rays.
Georgiades said he had spoken to police about the incident. “They said they were investigating the ‘accident’,” said Georgiades. “I told them it wasn’t an accident. They didn’t arrest anyone but they did take statements.”
Georgiades said he spoke yesterday with a senior officer at Famagusta CID who said they were dealing with the case. O’Dwyer gave a statement to police yesterday afternoon from his hospital bed.
The senior officer dealing with the case, George Economou, told the Cyprus Mail yesterday police would take statements from all concerned and decide if there was a case to press charges.
“Conor is just giving his statement now,” said Economou. Asked if there would be any arrests, he said he would know more today. “It depends on the investigation,” he said.
Georgiades said he has also informed the British High Commission.
With regard to the previous assault case against the developers, Georgiades said the charges had been dropped by the Attorney-general ostensibly because O’Dwyer had not shown up for a hearing.
But the lawyer said when the last hearing was due, O’Dwyer, who lives in the UK, had been told by prosecutors not to bother coming to Cyprus because the hearing would likely be adjourned.
“He didn’t come and on the day of the court case, the prosecutor said the judge wouldn’t give an adjournment so the proceedings against the two men would be stayed”.
O’Dwyer is now entering the third year of his property saga.
He and his wife were going to buy a house on a development in Frenaros village. However when they viewed the construction area when the project was coming along, they realised the surrounding homes were not those specified in the original plan.
This would have resulted in a total lack of privacy as two balconies on other properties would have been looking into their garden. O’Dwyer has said the reason they had chosen the site in the first place was for the privacy that was promised.
After several run-ins with the developers over the changes to the surrounding area, and although the house is registered to them at the Land Registry given they had paid for most of it, the O’Dwyers subsequently discovered that the developers had sold it to another British family, who now reside there. The O’Dwyers have not received their money back.
When O’Dwyer launched his story on youtube video, backed up by documents and taped conversations with the developers and their lawyers, Interior Minister Christos Patsalides ordered an investigation in August last year, but no results have been forthcoming.
Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2007
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Expat recounts horror of Frenaros assault
By Jean Christou
“I CAN’T let my kids see me like this,” says Conor O’Dwyer, the British home buyer beaten up in Frenaros village last Monday, when asked whether he plans to return to the UK as soon as he leaves hospital.
O’Dwyer was assaulted while gathering evidence for the two-year legal dispute he is in with his property developers.
A father and son have been in police custody since Thursday after O’Dwyer, 38, ended up in hospital. He was still there on Friday and worried about what would happen next.
“Am I afraid? I am absolutely afraid,” he told the Sunday Mail.
“It’s been absolutely horrendous but they are now in custody and I would rather it was extended until I leave the island.”
The British ex-soldier said he is determined not to go back to the UK until he sees the case through and he didn’t want his children to see him in such a state.
On Friday, five days after the attack, O’Dwyer was still unable to walk properly and said he felt a stabbing pain in the kidney area. “I’m still dragging my right leg,” he said.
Whatever his dispute with the developers, which is pending before the courts, O’Dwyer was not looking for the kind of trouble that befell him when he went to Frenaos village on Monday.
He certainly never expected to end up in hospital for a week.
He had gone there to take some pictures and measurements around the disputed property to help his two-year-old legal case, which he has outlined in minute detail on his website lyingbuilder.com and on the YouTube Internet video channel.
“I had a friend with me, an ex-marine, in a separate car and he was some 200 metres away on a dirt track in a field. He had two cameras, a helmet one and a camcorder with a 200 metre lens,” said O’Dwyer.
The two men had fixed a rendezvous point in case things did go wrong.
O’Dwyer said he then had a brief conversation with the woman who now lives in the house. “I said who I was and that I was gathering evidence. I was on the road and not the pavement. I took pictures and measurements,” he added. “It’s been two years since I viewed my house. I’ve been respectful up to now.”
He said all a sudden one of the arrested suspects – the father – blocked his friend’s path with his 4×4 and started shouting angrily.
“My friend did up the window and got on the phone to me. I told him we would call the whole thing off and I would come to him where he was. We didn’t want any trouble at all. But he was trapped there,” said O’Dwyer.
He himself then left the area to head for the rendezvous point, and was heading down towards the centre of Frenaros.
“Suddenly there was a car in front of me. I went to turn left and all of a sudden there was the son coming across the junction. It was a deliberate ramming and I will always remember his face as our cars crashed.”
O’Dwyer said there was also another man in the car.
“I turned off the engine and opened the door. He put out his hands to grab me and the first punch came in my eyes and nose,” said O’Dwyer.
“I staggered to the steps of the caf? pub and my nose was bleeding. I was wearing a button camera, which is no bigger than a cigarette packet and was sewn into my clothes.
“The son was then behind me and he wouldn’t let me get up. His father then showed up. He dropped his cigar and put his fist in my face. They then noticed the wire that had been attached to the camera and he shouted “camera, camera, camera”. They tried to grab it and I ran four metres or so and dropped into a foetal position clutching it and then the kicks to the back came. They rolled me over and the father kicked my head and ground his foot into my skull applying pressure.”
O’Dwyer said he was calling for help at the busiest junction in Frenaros but no one came to help.
“I held on as long as I could but the camera was ripped from me. They then went off,” he said. He said police have since recovered the camera but the SIM card with the data was missing.
Police then arrived and he asked the officer to help him retrieve his camera because the incident had been filmed.
“He didn’t want to know, and then I saw the camera disappear to the third individual,” said O’Dwyer.
He remembered that he had a digital camera in the boot of his car and managed to retrieve it and took some snaps of the eyewitnesses. The card from that camera went to the police so they could take statements from the people who were there.
By then an ambulance had arrived and O’Dwyer was taken to Paralimni hospital, and from there to Larnaca, from where he called his lawyer.
He did manage to find some humour in the situation when during his first day in hospital he was served with a summons after the developers filed suit against him over his website.
“They obviously sent the court server to the hospital because they were the only ones who knew where I was,” he said.
“My blood pressure was up and I signed the papers with my hand that was connected to a drip.” O’Dwyer is not concerned about the defamation suit because he said the developers had tried it before and the case was thrown out of court.
But the whole business has left O’Dwyer badly shaken, particularly as it was the second time he was attacked. The two developers were also charged with assaulting him in March 2006 but the charges were dropped.
“It’s not a reflection on all Cypriot developers but something must be done about these people. They assaulted me because they thought they got away with it the first time,” said O’Dwyer.
“I was scared, terrified. It was the second assault and the government had done nothing about my case. Maybe it needed to get worse before it gets better,” he said.
O’Dwyer had already gone to the police in the UK to secure a permit to demonstrate outside the Cyprus High Commission.
“If this trip bears no fruit that is my only option left,” he said.
Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2008
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Developers claim expat tried to blackmail them
By Jean ChristouTHE PARALIMNI property developers at the centre of a police assault investigation involving a British home buyer yesterday countered the allegation by accusing him of blackmail.
Conor O’Dwyer, 38, spent six days in Larnaca hospital last week after being allegedly assaulted by the father and son developers, who were later arrested and held in police custody for four days.
They were released on Monday pending further investigations.
It was the second time in less than two years that the two men had been arrested for allegedly assaulting O’Dwyer. The earlier charges were dropped.
O’Dwyer has widely publicised the details of his property dispute with the developers on YouTube and on the website lyingbuilder.com.
The dispute centres on the cancellation of his contract by the developers some half way through payment, even though the house in Frenaros was already registered in his name at the land registry.
O’Dwyer had complained because he said the developers were not sticking to the original plans he was paying for. They then cancelled the contact accusing him of not paying the next instalment. The developers then sold the house to someone else, telling O’ Dwyer they were keeping his £75,000 sterling for damages.
Yesterday on their website, Karayiannas Developers and Constructors said O’ Dwyer’s claims that they had misled him into purchasing the property were defamatory.
Under a link entitled “The Karayiannas saga… To find out more about the true events…”, a statement from the developers claimed that O’Dwyer had masterminded a plan to extort a newer more expensive property and exorbitant damages from the company.
Karayiannas said the British buyer had ignored reminders to pay the next instalment for the property, so they cancelled the contract as a last resort.
“After the cancellation of the contract, Mr. O’Dwyer set his plan in motion seeking for his revenge. A revenge originating from the fact that the value of the house he would have bought increased due to the current value housing boom,” said the statement.
The alleged plan involved O’Dwyer secretly taping a conversation with Marios Karayiannas and later using that tape recording as a threat to blackmail the company for “a private villa worth £400,000 and £100,000 in cash”, failing which he would create a website “defaming the company in such ways as to cause it great financial losses”.
“He was in plain and simple words blackmailing his way into a luxury villa and cash in hand,” the statement said.
But the company had “failed to adhere to his blackmail requests”.
O’Dwyer says he repeatedly attempted to make the contested payment, having decided to keep the house despite the differences between the original plan and the finished product, but claims Karayiannas refused to take the due payment, deciding, O’ Dwyer said, that he was giving them too much hassle over the terms of the contract.
After Karayiannas sent him a letter in March 2006 cancelling the contract, they kept refusing the payment. The final time O’Dwyer tried to send payment was through a court server, he said.
The same month Karayiannas’ lawyers sent him a letter – published on his website – saying: “As you committed essential breaches of your contract, you are hereby notified that they [Karayiannas] cancel the said agreement and retain the money already paid, towards damages.”
Another letter a month later said: “Even if for any reason in the end of the day it is decided that they [Karayianas] had no legal ground to cancel it due to your behaviour, they do not want you on their property and they hereby notify you that they are not willing to complete the house and deliver it to you.”
“The deal is over and they will never ever deliver to you your house.”
On Tuesday evening, O’Dwyer gave a full statement to police about the January 14 incident in Frenaros, which saw the Briton end up in hospital.
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By Jean Christou
THE TWO Paralimni property developers at the centre of a police investigation involving an alleged assault on a British home buyer have been charged with bodily harm and malicious damage to personal property, police said yesterday.
Ayia Napa police chief George Economou said the father and son were charged “a few days ago“.
“They were charged with bodily harm and with causing malicious damage to his camera,” said Economou.
The Ayia Napa police chief could not say when the case would reach the courts. “That’s not up to us,” he said. “It’s up to the courts“.
Economou said it could take anything from a month to two months or longer.
The two men were arrested last month and remanded for four days by the Paralimni court for the alleged assault on British buyer Conor O’Dwyer, but then released without charge while police continued their investigations.
These culminated in the charges that have now been filed.
O’Dwyer, 38, spent a week in Larnaca hospital last month after he was beaten up in Frenaros when he went to take pictures of a house he had bought and over which he later came into dispute with the developers. He said they unilaterally cancelled his contract and kept his money, some £75,000 sterling, because he had pulled them up over what he saw as a violation of the terms of the contract. The case is pending at court.
O’Dwyer has widely publicised the details of his dispute with the developers on YouTube and on the website lyingbuilder.com.
In a public statement recently, the developers accused O’Dwyer of allegedly masterminding a plan to extort a newer, more expensive property, and exorbitant damages from the company.
But the company had “failed to adhere to his blackmail requests“.
O’Dwyer says he attempted several times to make the payment because he decided to keep the house despite the differences between the original plan and the reality, but the developers refused to take the due payment, deciding, O’ Dwyer said, that he was giving them too much hassle over the terms of the contract.
They in turn accused him of violating the terms of the contract and said in a letter posted on O’Dwyer’s website that they would be keeping all money paid so far for damages.
Copyright © Cyprus Mail 2008
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