Dave Kelsey said his Jaguar was left in a worse state after receiving services from Havelock North business Village European. Photo / Dave Kelsey
A “horrendous mess”. That’s how Napier man Dave Kesley describes the experience of taking his Jaguar in to be repaired at Havelock North garage Village European.
Kelsey contacted Hawke’s Bay Today this week to talk about his 2018 car dramas after reading of the dispute between Lady Deborah Holmes and Village European owner Jason Lee.
Holmes claims she has been left out of pocket with a barely usable Range Rover, claims she believes Lee has misled insurers about the circumstances of an accident during the servicing of it, and claims he subsequently stole her engine.
Lee claims the circumstances that led to Holmes’ late-model vehicle being fitted with an engine with 191,000km on the clock was a series of unfortunate events, rather than anything “untoward”.
Kelsey was one of seven customers who have come forward to Hawke’s Bay Today following the publication of the Holmes-Lee dispute, alleging the handiwork of Lee’s businesses left their cars in a worse condition than when they came in, and that Lee’s communication or conduct was poor.
However, Lee has supporters too.
An open letter has been signed by 30 customers of Village European and sent to Hawke’s Bay Today.
It tells of Lee’s aptitude as a mechanic and his “willingness to honestly and fairly get to the bottom of a problem and to solve it as cost-effectively as possible”.
In a statement in response to those who had come forward to Hawke’s Bay Today with complaints, Lee said:
“Ms Holmes always stated ‘she was very well connected to the media and would bring us down’. I’ll let the 99.9 per cent of our 2000 customers decide their opinion on this.”
Holmes said this was a “blatant lie” from Lee, who she believed was behaving like an “absolute rogue” in a bid to save his business.
She said she had been inundated by messages from people who’d had long and frustrating dealings with Lee and, while she had “no desire to bring anyone down”, she wanted people to be aware of the way he had conducted his business.
Before Jason Lee started Village European, he also ran Lee European in Palmerston North.
An Employment Relations Authority dispute saw Lee European fined almost $3000 in a decision released in late 2017, and the company was placed into liquidation on August 9, 2018.
According to the final liquidator’s report for Lee European, the company was placed into liquidation after a dispute with a private individual.
The report says the private individual had asked the company’s services to sell their vehicle; however, the funds received from the sale were never paid over following “a prolonged dispute concerning subsequent repair costs incurred by the company”.
Attempts to recover the amount due under the contract saw an application made to the High Court.
An order was granted on August 9, 2018, placing the company in liquidation.
Lee told Hawke’s Bay Today both Village European and Lee European were running in sync for a period.
He said a divorce settlement had then led to financial issues, and triggered events that forced the shutting down of the Palmerston North business.
Which brings us to Dave Kelsey and Richard Anderson — customers of Village and Lee European respectively around the time of the liquidation — who both sympathise with Holmes’ situation and feel Lee was not up front with them.
A Jaguar mechanic himself, Kelsey said he took his 1997 Jaguar XJR6 to Village European in November 2018 for work he could not complete due to modules in the vehicle.
Months later, the car remained with Lee. Email correspondence in March 2019 shows Kelsey pleading with Lee to respond as communication dried up.
“My car, a 1997 Jaguar XJR6, has now been with you for over four months. I was told I would be kept up to date on progress, at least once a month,” the email stated.
“Apart from one phone call, I have received nothing from you. I am still waiting for you to return my phone call from the 23rd of January.”
When Kelsey finally did receive the car later that month, he said it was riddled with issues even though he had left a list of instructions in the back seat of the car.
“He charged me $330 for [fuel] injectors, and they had been done just 50km before,” he said.
“It was over-fuelling so badly; it just about wrote the engine off. There was also a great big split on the wheel.”
There was also a dispute over missing parts.
“When they supposedly finished the car, it was brought back and I noticed the plastic covers under the engine were missing.”
“I said I want the parts that are missing, and [a mechanic] goes to a wooden bin and went on for half an hour through all the plastic covers that had been taken off people’s engines.”
Lee said Kelsey’s Jaguar was an old vehicle with complex electrical issues that they “simply couldn’t fix”.
Richard Anderson, who traded his 2006 Land Rover Discovery 3 for a 2010 V8 Discovery 4 with Lee European in 2018, said he also went through a prolonged process with Lee that had caused stress to him and his family.
It ended with Anderson calling the police, accusing Lee European of stealing his tow assembly.
Lee refutes that claim.
“The towbar was removed as part of the work we undertook and, I suspect, not refitted in the mess of handing over a complex job from one workshop to another,” he said.
“Definitely not stolen — from memory I think it was found in the end, or we supplied another one.”
Anderson claims he found out the cause of many of the time delays was stop-credit situations that Lee had with other businesses that prevented cars and parts from being released.
Lee said his divorce settlement had led to financial issues.
Meanwhile, a letter sent to Hawke’s Bay Today from 30 regular customers says their experiences with Lee at Village European had been exemplary.
“It is not our place to dispute or refute the accusations within [the article concerning Deborah Holmes]. It is our place, however, as regular customers, to give a completely different side of the story,” the letter states.
“None of this sounds remotely familiar to us. Jason and his service are renowned by car owners in Havelock North and beyond.”
The letter writers said they had pulled together their signatures off their own bat, and not at Lee’s insistence because they understood “the incredible damage a story like this can inflict on a hard-earned reputation in a small town”.
The letter says those customers who have had the opposite of the experiences of those previously mentioned should “stick by this local business and spread the word even further”.
Mitchell Hageman joined Hawke’s Bay Today in early 2023. From his Napier base, he writes regularly on social issues, arts and culture, and the community.