Feuding, fights and fireworks
A neighbourhood war between two South Auckland businessmen has split a community and ended in legal battles. Steve Kilgallon reports.
Street brawls, rogue fireworks, drunken car crashes and alleged after-hour alcohol sales: Hendrick Lim watches an unusual variety of video clips on his iPhone. Every night, just after 11pm, Lim checks an app on the device. It shows a live-stream of the CCTV cameras encircling his family’s petrol station – and also gives him a perfect view of the neighbouring liquor store.
He’s gathering evidence of what he alleges are repeated illicit after-hours alcohol sales. Behind Lim’s application to revoke the liquor licence of his neighbour, Gurpreet ‘Guru’ Kandola, is a bitter feud between two families which has split the business community of the South Auckland suburb of Papatoetoe.
The row erupted when Lim’s father, Albert, the chair of the town’s business association, expelled Kandola from the organisation, alleging he had tried to roll him as chair by forging ballot papers.
Kandola denies any wrongdoing, but is serving a five-year ban from the Papatoetoe Central Main Street Society.
Hendrick Lim’s video recordings, he believes, are a breach of his privacy and he has lodged a police complaint. That the Kandolas do not like being on camera is clear: the man offering a one-finger salute in one screengrab is Kandola’s elderly father.
The Lims claim there is no feud. Albert Lim says the argument is on Kandola’s side. ‘‘There is no disagreement, he started it,’’ he says.
Son Hendrick says: ‘‘He developed a grudge. We leave him alone. I never directly interfere with any of their stuff.’’
But Kandola says he’s tried to repair things: ‘‘I am more than happy to have a good relationship with him [Albert] – but he is a dickhead . . . It is a dead end.’’
The dirty laundry between the two families was soberly aired at a liquor licensing hearing in Manukau last month, and a panel is due to decide the fate of Kandola’s Black Bull Sky Liquor store in the next few weeks.
Hendrick Lim was born in, raised at and still resides in the attached apartment at the GAS petrol station on Kolmar Rd, Papatoetoe. For a year, Hendrick compiled his dossier, taken from the 10 cameras around the property, eventually submitting a spreadsheet of links to CCTV clips posted on YouTube. Despite a protest from Kandola’s lawyer, Jon Wiles, the licensing committee agreed to accept the recordings.
Lim’s lawyer, Grant Hewison, says: ‘‘Frankly, I have never seen so much and such compelling evidence or even anything close to it – ever before’’ tabled by an objector at a liquor licensing hearing. Lim’s dad, Albert, says his son has ‘‘done the committee’s job for them’’.
The clips show the brawl on December 15, 2019, when two groups of men fought a rolling battle across the liquor store’s car park and the petrol station forecourt, one of them waving around a wooden pallet, another allegedly brandishing a knife.
It shows two dramatic car crashes, one when a car smashed into a concrete wall at speed and injured a neighbouring businessman, the other on Christmas Eve 2019, when a van careered through the liquor store car park, and into two trailers parked on the petrol station forecourt, throwing one of them into a car fuelling at the pumps, before buckling a metal post. The abusive driver was arrested by police. Albert Lim claims the van had been parked up for some hours in Kandola’s car park, before leaving, then returning and crashing.
It shows Bonfire Night 2019, when fireworks were set off and Hendrick called police, alleging one had shot across onto their forecourt, dangerously close to their fuel pumps.
It shows people drinking in the liquor store car park and, most importantly, it showed about a dozen instances of what Hendrick alleged was liquor store staff making sales after the store’s legal closing time of 11pm.
They formed the basis of his objection to the renewal of Kandola’s liquor licence, which went before the district licensing committee hearing. Kandola says he’s a responsible licensee who has tried hard to negotiate peace, meeting with police, the Ministry of Health and with Dr Hewison to no avail. ‘‘He [Albert] wants to take the root out so the tree doesn’t grow,’’ he said lyrically. Kandola says the first car crash was due to mechanical failure, and there’s no evidence the second driver had been at his store; his staff members actually halted the fireworks being set off by a local, and the brawl was sparked by a dispute at a neighbouring restaurant, and it was, again, his staff who called police to break it up.
But most of that was kept to the written evidence: the hearing instead concentrated on whether Guru Kandola had sold booze after hours.
He produced till receipts to show he hadn’t, and Hendrick Lim had time-stamped CCTV footage to show that he had.
The receipts were well studied. On one night, Kandola had apparently put through three transactions in the magic minute before 11pm, his cut-off time, including one at 10.59.59.
That led to a long, slow dance with Hewison about the time it might have taken his final customer, who had just bought a pack of beers, to realise he was also peckish, select, and pay for a packet of Mother Earth cashew nuts.
Eventually, Hewison put it to him baldly – could he really have made three sales inside 20 seconds? ‘‘Easily,’’ said Guru, ‘‘come to my shop and watch it.’’
He said there was no way he could change the timings on his system, so Hendrick Lim must have tampered with his recordings.
Hendrick, for his part, told the hearing that the video stream from the security cameras had a timestamp encoded on it, synchronised every few fractions of a second from the internet, and was hard to fake. His iPhone, likewise, had synchronised time. ‘‘The reason I need this accuracy is I know the magnitude of this evidence.’’
It sounded compelling, although not many people agreed and the panel got annoyed that Lim hadn’t brought an expert witness to verify his claims. ‘‘I think the accuracy speaks for itself,’’ said Hendrick. Wiles, Kandola’s lawyer, dismissively called it ‘‘an arrogant assumption’’.
A hasty attempt to admit Albert Lim as an expert witness on how easy it would be to change the timestamps on Eftpos receipts was refused. Afterwards, Albert said he’d tried with his own Eftpos system, and been able to re-set the date and time easily.
Albert, however, had by then already tripped himself up, contradicting his written evidence with his verbal evidence, then admitting he’d not written nor properly read his statement. There was a long silence as Albert, under instructions from the chair, read his own statement to see if there was anything else wrong with it.
Kandola, who was an ebullient, belligerent, confident witness, was delighted, nudging Wiles under the table and bestowing munificent smiles on the audience.
Wiles spent a lot of time at the hearing trying to quell that passion, wagging his finger at him, whispering ‘be patient’, stopping him from interjecting. At one stage, Kandola asked the chair if he could ask questions. He could not.
At the lunch break, he emerged from the Totara Room at the same time as the formidable Glenn McCutcheon, the former chair of anti-liquor activist group Communities Against Alcohol Harm, who had
organised 60 written objections, though none had turned up to follow through.
He thrust out a hand, and McCutcheon shook reluctantly. ‘‘Don’t you like me?’’ he asked. ‘‘No!’’ said McCutcheon.
There were several occasions where the footage showed, indubitably, something had happened after the 11pm timestamp.
There was one where Kandola appeared to slip a bag to a man at 11.07pm; another where Kandola’s father allows a man to take a package from his car at 11.08pm, and several occasions where customers appear to be served after 11pm, if only by a few minutes.
But each time the footage showed parcels and packages leaving the shop after closing time, Kandola had an explanation, and an affidavit.
One bloke was dropping off some LED lights during a power outage. Another was collecting some takeaway food. Another package was simply an empty box heading for the recycling.
In one video, they watched Kandola taking a bag outside and Hewison saying it was square in shape, resembling a box of beers. ‘‘I don’t know what shape you are talking about, but I don’t accept it is alcohol,’’ Kandola said. Theatrically, he produced a white bag with a Black Bull logo to demonstrate that was what he sold his beer in.
Later would come Kamal Singh Varma, who coowned a mobile mortgage business with Kandola, and testified that yes, he clearly recalled the incident on October 16, captured on the CCTV, which showed him outside the shop after 11pm, and Kandola handing him a bag. But it contained expired and faulty shisha products, which he imported from China. They’d often catch up for late-night business chats. Was it alcohol? Varma looked shocked. It wasn’t.
Varma was not the only witness Kandola had lined up, although their testimonies wearied Sergeant Keith Barker, who represents the police at liquor applications. The word he chose, and used several times, was ‘‘sceptical’’.
Barker was in a procedural bind. At first, he had opposed the application, based on various allegations about Kandola which he later had had time to investigate, dismiss, and change his position to notopposed. But then came the CCTV footage, and he changed his mind again. However, case law suggested he could not officially change his position, so he settled for a memo explaining his opposition. The licensing inspector, Kali Talanoa, also seemed unconvinced. The word she used a lot was ‘‘concerned’’, although she stayed firmly on the fence.
Kandola’s other supporters were Saleshni Khan, who owned a neighbouring shop and said Kandola had tried hard to dissuade window washers, was a good businessman, and she’d never seen anyone drinking in the car park, as Hendrick Lim alleged.
Graham Barber, who helped his son run a panelbeaters in the laneway behind the shops, said he’d never seen any drinking either.
Barber said Albert Lim had asked him to sign a letter objecting to the licence, and he’d refused. He liked Guru.
Then, he said, ‘‘Albert said ‘you haven’t heard the last of this, I am the chair of the Papatoetoe Business Association and I will sue you for defamation’.’’
Albert said that was simply not true. Barber was staunch. ‘‘I have sworn on the Bible and what I say is correct.’’ He did have the date of the incident wrong, however.
Barber reckoned if you fell out with Albert Lim, ‘‘your life is hard ... when I say it’s hard, it’s that Mr Lim controls that Main Street [society].’’
And Max McDermid, owner of the local New World, said he considered Kandola a good businessman and an asset to the community. He said: ‘‘I’m appalled that what I consider to be a personal conflict with another business owner and the latter is apparently using that to drive Guru out of business.’’
Was that the case? The hearing certainly seemed to be the culmination of something bigger. The Papatoetoe Central Main Street Society operates in what’s known in council-speak as a Business Improvement District (BID), where local businesses are charged an extra, ‘targeted’ rate to fund measures to help spruce up the neighbourhood.
In Albert Lim’s view, ‘Old’ Papatoetoe has been on the slide for a while. He’s been in the area since 1983, and has owned the GAS station – and lived in the adjoining apartment – since 1986. ‘‘I’ve seen a change, it used to be a quiet town,’’ he says. ‘‘Now there are a lot of window washers and homeless people and gangsters lately.’’
It’s perhaps one of the few things that he agrees on with Guru Kandola, who launched a WhatsApp group for local businesses to report the antics of the window washers.
Albert used to be unopposed when he stood as Main Street chairman, says the society’s salaried manager, Rana Judge. Judge is also the manager of the neighbouring O¯ tara Business Association, and runs the Papatoetoe society part-time.
It’s one of the issues between Kandola and Lim senior: Kandola thinks Papatoetoe deserves a fulltime town manager.
Come election time, Kandola decided to run for chairman.
At the liquor licensing hearing, Judge told the committee that Kandola had ‘‘tried to sabotage the society by putting in forged documents at election time, and tried to destroy democracy’’.
Afterwards, Judge explained they had a database of business ratepayers who were eligible to vote – some 85 businesses and another 20 property owners – but somehow he had ended up with 135 votes.
On the advice of the council BID team, he cancelled the vote and issued new ballot papers with serial numbers.
Judge’s brief of evidence also said that he had made a police complaint against Kandola and his father, saying they had abused him and Kandola Sr had shoved him several times after advising them that new ballot papers were being circulated. Kandola denies any assault and no charges were laid.
It was not, said Lim, the first issue they had with Kandola, who had previous warnings, and his expulsion followed a careful legal process.
Lim, who says he is a hardworking volunteer who has never taken a dollar for his efforts, believed Kandola had then ‘‘gone behind us and gone to the local board’’; a complaint which had triggered a funding cut.
But the allegations outrage Kandola. ‘‘I would be in the jail!’’ he exclaims. ‘‘It’s a bull .... allegation.’’ What really happened, says Kandola, is he tried to get more businesses involved by photocopying the forms and handing them out. ‘‘Maybe I’ve gone to a few more shops I didn’t know weren’t inside the Business Improvement district. They must have got two or three extra forms . . . they should have said ‘no, we can’t accept these forms’, and continued with the rest.’’ Instead, he says, ‘‘they have done an injustice with me’’.
Kandola was first expelled for a year, he says, then in February 2019, formally banned for five years for ‘‘bringing the society into disrepute’’. ‘‘And I’m pretty sure when the five years comes, they will do it again’’.
That’s where the feud began. ‘‘That was the beginning of this thing, absolutely,’’ says Kandola. ‘‘They’ve basically tried to get me out.’’
Kandola reckons he has the support of the town, pointing to his line-up of witnesses at the hearing.
What the council’s BID team did to repair the rift is unknown: after four inquiries over eight days, Auckland Council finally said it did not appear to have any current staff on the team who were aware of the issues, and would not normally discuss details of these matters with the media anyway.
O¯ tara-Papatoetoe local board chair Lotu Fuli was more helpful. She said the board considered revitalising the Papatoetoe business district a priority, but they had ‘‘not seen the returns we would like’’ from their funding of the society, the feud had not helped, and so they would now focus on partnering with other community groups.
The society was a private body, so the board was restricted in what they could do and had to stay neutral. But you could tell she was frustrated. ‘‘We’ve tried to bring the parties together to see if they could come to some sort of resolution, but we have failed to do that . . . we remain hopeful we can somehow mediate those issues, but this has gone on for some time.
‘‘It’s two very strong personalities who just don’t get on, and there has been a huge breakdown in trust. We’ve done as much as we can, I feel. The officers have worked very hard to get the parties to work together, but . . . even to get them in the same room together is pretty much impossible.’’
The committee will deliver its findings this month. Albert Lim said he was expecting to lose the licensing decision, but was already preparing to appeal, and was considering placing the society’s support behind it. He hoped police would apply to Paymark for the actual sales data from Kandola’s Eftpos machine, to finally settle the timing dispute.
Until then, the two families must co-exist. ‘‘I am more than happy to work along with him, but he has to have that willingness to do that, and I know his character,’’ says Kandola.
‘‘We don’t talk at all,’’ he adds. ‘‘He doesn’t cross my path. If we do, we don’t look at each other, he closes his eyes.’’
‘‘We’ve done as much as we can, I feel. The officers have worked very hard to get the parties to work together, but . . . even to get them in the same room together is pretty much impossible.’’ Lotu Fuli, right O¯ tara-Papatoetoe local board chair