How to do a deal in a sector and a country you barely know

Early this year news reached me that there was unusual activity at my house in Sri Lanka. Unknown boys were at work clearing the overgrown garden. Within a month they had opened a roti shop (street food restaurant) and started getting five star reviews on TripAdvisor.

I faced the prospect of losing something I loved and I had no idea how to prevent it happening. It took 90 days to get my land back. This is the story of the challenges I faced and how I overcame them. I have never posted something personal here before but I wanted to share my experience in the hope of inspiring others to be resilient and adaptable when they next face a difficult challenge. It is a long read - approximately 15 minutes. To make it easier to scan or return to it's divided into seven chapters. If you enjoy it please click the like button so others will find it too.

1. The beginning

The house had been an impulse buy. I had fallen in love with Sri Lanka in the 1990s while living in Hong Kong. In 2003, at Christmas, I returned to stay with friends who had built a villa on the south coast and looked at some properties for my brother in law who wanted to invest. I ended up buying one for myself instead and planned to build a tree house or a surf shack there. It was on a beautiful bay shaped like a horseshoe in a village called Hiriketiya. It was tranquil, secret and very special.

In the years since I bought it life got in the way of my plans. I was busy with my career, the friend who I hoped would project manage a new house sadly passed away, and then there was the 2005 Asian tsunami. So, it had been empty and abandoned all that time and at last, with tourism booming, someone had decided to see how they could profit from my absence and the rising land value.

"Houston, we have a problem". It wasn't a life threatening situation but, having some idea of the challenges that lay ahead, I was alarmed and felt totally ill equipped to solve the problem. Who were these people? What was my legal position? Would the be police support and help me? Would I have the backing of the village? Would my ownership of the property be contested?

That last question was key because, like a lot of land in Sri Lanka, mine doesn't have 'clear' title. Some of the descendants of the first owner, who was gifted public land by the British colonial government in 1919, have never received their share of the inheritance when the land was later sold. On top of that a reliable system of recording land transactions has never been established in Sri Lanka: deeds are missing, inaccurate or worse. What all this means is that, while I certainly own most of the land I bought in 2004, I didn't own all of it. And while possession for over ten years affords me protection from title disputes, most locals don't know this. It leaves me open to land disputes that could come from anyone, including a bunch of roti cooks.

So what happened when the call came from Hiriketiya?

2. Denial. 19 January - 19 February.

For a month I ducked, deferred and delegated the problem. I was afraid of it and didn't want to tackle it head on.

Instead, I decided to give a trusted friend's trusted villa manager power of attorney (POA) and ask him to make a police complaint and do the needful to evict the trespassers. It didn't work out like that. It took the entire month to arrange the POA using Sri Lanka's old fashioned paper-based legal processes and by courier and during that time the problem had escalated when the roti shop opened. In one month the situation had become much more serious and it was going to be more difficult to evict the roti shop boys.

Long after I should have, I got on a plane to Colombo, with no idea what I was going to do when I got there.

3. The First Attempt. 19 February - 9 March

I spent the first five days consulting three lawyers, two real estate agents, five expats living in Sri Lanka and three local business people in Colombo, Galle and finally in Hiriketiya.

Everyone had a different interpretation of the law and a different solution to the problem but no-one seemed to have the definitive answer. It appeared I had three options.

Option One - The Lawyer's Option

Within hours of arriving in Colombo I was hearing alarming things from a leading lawyer who came highly recommended. If I didn't get the squatters off my land within 90 days of their appearance there, they would have the right to make a claim on the title. That would mean a court case that could drag on for years, numerous 10,000 mile round trips for court appearances, legal fees and uncertain outcomes. In the words of another lawyer, "Our court system is broken. The courts are a disgrace. Avoid them at all costs."

How was I to get the squatters off then?

The squatters weren't actually the real problem. The local manager who had worked for the company that managed the land and house for me, until it closed in 2012, is a serial trespasser on foreign owned land. We'll call him K. K had got into financial difficulty and was going about extorting money by any means possible. Installing trespassers on land he once managed and then extorting money from the owner to evict them was one of his favourite methods. His protégés had been thrown off a neighbour's land in the same village the week before he masterminded the pop-up roti shop on mine.

K claimed he'd been paying a watcher to guard my land from squatters. Oh, the lovely irony. He had been doing this without a break since his contract ended with the property management company, he said. I owed him the watchers salary, he said. So when the roti shop boys turned up, he allowed them to stay. He showed them a bogus letter appointing him as my manager and giving him free reign to do what he liked with the land. I assume he charged the roti shop boys rent.

So here comes the lawyer's option.

If I could record him saying all of the above it could be used in court to prove he'd been acting as my manager, was not the owner and therefore was trespassing. The threat of a court case would persuade him to leave.

All I had to do was to meet him for a friendly chat and secretly record the conversation.

I didn't much fancy this option. It sounded scary. K was a powerful local figure. I knew that plenty of local people would never risk getting on the wrong side of him. I wasn't sure it was a good idea for me to do so either.

Another reason I didn't like this option was that it didn't come with a plan of execution. How would the practical side of things get done? Who would actually evict the squatters? I didn't know.

Nonetheless, I asked a real estate agent (see below) if he'd have this conversation on my behalf because they knew each other and the agent had a reputation as an effective deal maker.

Option Two - The Agent's Option

The agent had been chasing me to sell since one of his clients made an offer for the land in 2014. I didn't want to sell. I hadn't yet given up on my dream but we'd kept in touch anyway.

I asked him to record K telling him that he was managing the land on my behalf in case we had to go to court to evict him. I also asked him to find out what K wanted. It was obvious the best option was to do a deal and pay him off.

The agent had other ideas. They shocked me. He wanted me to make K a partner. I would pay him for evicting the roti shop and then agree to a monthly management fee which would be paid out of the sale price. "We should be able to get K to sign an agreement and adhere to it," said the agent. But later he changed his tune. "I am not sure whether we could get him off. But having a written document stating that he would vacate the premisses on receipt of a sum of money would be something we could present to potential buyers who might have any questions about this."

Great.

Finally, he suggested that the deal would work best if I agreed to pay K sales commission, should he find me a buyer.

Even better.

It was a creative solution but I couldn't stomach it. It felt like fraternising with the enemy and, anyway, I didn't intend to sell it. If anything, this just made me determined to sort it out myself. So I started to call K daily and invite him to talk. There was absolutely no response. I couldn't find him anywhere.

Option 3 - the Neighbour's Option

It had been a long five days and so far I had been offered one impractical and one unpalatable option. In desperation, I spoke to my neighbour, the other victim of K's scam in Hiriketiya, who had succeeded in getting him off his land. I asked his advice."Avoid any engagement whatsoever with the law. Do no make a police complaint. Do not involve lawyers. Demolish the house", he said.

I liked the simplicity and logic of this option. The house was mine, I could do what I liked with it, so long as I hadn't started any legal process. Otherwise, demolition would be seen as obstructing the law. All I had to do was find someone with a bulldozer who was willing to demolish the house and then pounce when the roti shop was empty at night.

Three local hotel and restaurant owners said they'd help me to pull this off. When one of them asked the roti shop boys to keep the noise down one arak-fuelled evening (arak is the local booze made from coconut palm syrup), he had a knife pulled on him. He wasn't harmed but they were all upset that K was throwing his weight around like this, encouraging bad behaviour and making trouble in the village.

I was put in touch with a fixer, going by the glorious name of Gigi, who would find a contractor with a bulldozer willing to demolish the house, taking care to leave all the roti equipment unharmed and without laying a finger on anyone there. A vexatiously tricky problem on its own. But the real problem was that K wielded enough power to scare off any contractors and no-one would touch it. Our plan was dead in the water.

Instead, Gigi turned private detective, working through his own network to find out what K wanted and how we could get him to meet us and agree a deal. He wanted to bring K to the negotiating table by exerting pressure on him from the police and from the local business and village community. I wasn't sure how this would actually work nor, frankly, how much it would cost but, I agreed to his plan and crossed my fingers. I was free to go home after I made an official police complaint to get the police onside and met with the village headman to get the village elders onside.

I was back in London, exhausted, on 8 March after 18 days away. I think everyone believed I'd been on an extended holiday in paradise. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

4. Reality dawns. 9 -22 March

After a week, nothing had happened. K failed to attend police enquiries and the police failed to tell my attorney when the enquiries were rescheduled. The clock was ticking and in less than two months my title would be in jeopardy if I didn't act. Then a message arrived from my fixer asking for power of attorney. Unlike my friend's manager, I didn't know this guy from Adam. I told him by the time we could arrange POA using DHL, I could be there myself. It looked like I needed to go back.

But I needed a new plan. I called my neighbour Dennis again and just as last time he had a clear message for me. "Get out there. Stay in the village. Build your network. Try everything until something sticks", he said. It was time I took control and that would require full immersion.

5. Full immersion. 23 March - 20 April

I was back in Sri Lanka within two weeks and got to work. My first office was unbearably hot. I needed a cool head so I moved my office here and things really started to happen.

Police enquiries and coercion

In all, K failed to turn up to assist police with their enquiries four times on the 10, 28 and 30 March and on 8 April. The police appeared unconcerned and here's why. It turns out, their drinking hole was in K's bar. It was clear they weren't treating this as urgent and, when he did show up as requested on 20 March, my attorney hadn't been asked to attend so it was a bogus enquiry.

Finally, on March 31 K turns up to answer police enquiries. I attended the meeting in the Chief Inspector's office of Dikwella police. After cursory enquiries, I'm horrified to find myself bounced into negotiating a price for vacant possession. I'm assisted by a lawyer who I don't know and don't trust. I'd specifically told him that I didn't want to negotiate a deal right now, knowing that I'd be at a disadvantage as the meeting would be conducted in Sinhalese. He ignores me. It feels like he has a stake in the negotiation. I'm getting paranoid. Surely, the police should be enforcing the law but they're helping my trespasser to secure a handsome payment for his crime. In spite of this, I'm thrilled to agree a sum to pay off K. By any measure, this is the best option. Far better than the courts.

The deal goes viral

As soon as the deal was agreed it went viral. On 5 April, the leader of the roti shop boys complains to the police that he is owed money too. He claims that I owe him half what I've agreed to pay K, on top of K's payment. I was asked to return with K to help the police with their new enquiries on 8 April. I took the view that the roti shop boy's claim was K's responsibility since he has always said that he was acting as my property manager. On that basis, I felt there was nothing I could do to "help the police with their enquiries" but I showed up as requested. Naturally, K didn't turn up.

Making frenemies.

This new claim threatened to blow the agreement with K out of the water. I needed to find a way to get K to accept his responsibility to settle it.

I asked the owner of the property management company that employed K before 2012 how she thought I could persuade K to co-operate. What I really needed was proof that K hadn't been my property manager since 2012 and that my payment to him was based on a fiction. If I could prove this, I could walk away from our agreement and he wouldn't get his money his money. The threat might not be enough to get him to walk away but just enough to get him to share my payment with the roti shop boy.

When I'd asked to see proof of redundancy in January I was told it wasn't possible. It wasn't clear if it didn't exist or was too difficult to find. Now, I asked again. It was in storage in Colombo and retrieving it would be "inconvenient" and couldn't be done immediately. This wasn't the answer I was looking for and to say the least it was disappointing.

I asked what else they could do to help. They promised to speak to K's brother in law, a friend, to ask for his advice. The brother in law said he'd persuade K to meet me. We discussed the meeting in detail and agreed I should meet in a friendly manner, give K lots of face and suggest that a man of his influence will surely be able to settle the roti boys claim....from the fee that I'm going to pay him.

K and I met on 9 April - for the first time, other than at the police station, since this all started. I wanted to tell him what a miserable piece of ---- he is, but there was way too much at stake. Instead I shook his hand, poured him a drink, and chatted about his New Year plans. In short, I made a giant mental adjustment. I was meeting K as someone I shared a problem with, not as someone who embodied my problem. Language was a challenge as always but I wanted to believe that he accepted that to receive his money, he must settle the other claim himself.

A change of tune.

After the discussion, we met with the roti shop boy at the police station. This time the police facilitated the negotiation in my favour - a 180 degree change in direction. They seemed to have switched their loyalty from K to me and K agreed to settle the boy's claim. It felt too easy and sure enough, as soon as we left the Chief Inspector's office, K said he couldn't pay the roti shop boy and he's going to put in a land claim and "take me to court". I'm thrilled and terrified to find I've grown some balls, so to speak, and I call his bluff. I say no and he flounces out of the station. I have no idea where I stand now.

A new year, a new chance.

Not knowing if K intends to renege on our deal or not, I have to use all my wits to push it through to completion. The deal between K and the roti shop boy was agreed on Monday. Sinhalese New Year starts on Thursday and everyone wants to tie up loose ends, close deals and have money in their pocket for the holidays. On Tuesday, 10 April, the penny drops that this a powerful lever I can use to get the deal done. Someone in K's financial difficulty can surely not resist cash in hand before the holidays, even if he doesn't like the terms. So, the same day I rush to Colombo to get a cheque for him. There's been wave after wave of problems, some of my own making, with transferring money to SL and I have to ask my lawyers to make out a cheque from their trading account but I must pick it up before they close for two weeks for the holidays. If I don't take this chance now the whole deal may go sour. It's a stormy six hour round trip to Colombo and back but I return with the cheque in my hand, ready to hand over at the police station once the house is vacated by the roti shop.

6. Diary of the last 36 hours

The following is from the diary I kept from 19 January to the end of April.

Wednesday, 11 April

0900 Meeting at police to show K the cheque and place it in the police safe until I'm satisfied that I have vacant possession. K signs my letter stating the terms of the agreement and agrees to send the roti boys packing.  But not before he demands that they are paid cash in advance! I eye ball him my most determined look and say, "No money until I’m satisfied."

1330 K rings from the police station asking why I’m not there with the money. I happen to have just looked at progress and there’s masses more to take away. Again, I just say no. I’ll meet him when the house and land is 100% cleared.

1600 Everything is off the site. I relish the moment before going to the police. 

The cheque has been put in the police safe and because it’s a holiday tomorrow everyone has left early. The Chief Inspector doesn't have the safe combination and can’t release the cheque. We agree to go back at 10am tomorrow. I make a dig at the police officer. "10 am exactly?" I ask.

I go back to Hiriketiya to ask the local builder to get a JCB ready to demolish the house tomorrow. This is the only way to ensure there are no squatters in the future. At first, it looks like he’s been able to arrange it, in spite of the New Year holiday, but later he says they’ve pulled out and there is no explanation. I wait. 

Thursday, 12 April

0700 I hear that the builder can’t arrange a JCB because of village politics which means everyone is too scared of K and also that K is planning "to move back in". I believe it. Someone gives me another number for JCB hire and I call immediately. Not surprisingly, they speak no English and my Sinhalese is up to nothing at all. In desperation, I hand my phone to the new front man at Dots, where I'm eating breakfast. Incredibly, he hands the phone back in less than a minute and says it's all sorted. It turns out he knows them. Of course he does. The JCB contractor has agreed to come at 0930. It's cutting it fine as the meeting to hand over the cheque is at 1000 at the police so I'll have to meet the contractor, explain what's needed, agree a price and then leave them to hand over the cheque at the police station. I want everything to be ready for an immediate start when I get back.

0930 The JCB arrives and starts work straight away. In my excitement, I've forgotten to ask him to wait until I return from the police. But the head roti shop boy protests the money hasn’t been handed over – which is true. So I ask the digger to wait and go with the boy to the police.

1000 The police inspector hands the cheque over. K ham-acts a "problem" with the cheque. He gets out an ID card to check the spelling of his own name. Then another one! When he can’t find fault with the spelling of his name he complains that its a Standard Chartered cheque and there isn’t a branch in Dikwella.  I've 100% had it with this man and I tell him straight to man up, get in his car and drive to Colombo and cash the cheque. This time it's me that flounces out. I feel good about that, but bad I didn’t thank the chief inspector for his, eventual, help. 

1045 I go back to get the digger started. After 25 minutes all the roti shop boys show up again and stand in front of the JCB to stop it.

Again, they protest and say it can’t go ahead because….who knows. Maybe they're complaining they haven't been paid. I ask my attorney to call the Chief Inspector and to ask him to speak to the JCB man. He does. The JCB resumes.

1800 Demolition complete.  

That evening for the first time I felt unsafe in Hiriketiya. The roti shop boys had been very excited by the demolition and one of them ran a juice stall right outside where I was staying, which had zero security. I beat a retreat to a friend's house nearby.

I stayed another week to have the land fenced and think about what I would do next. After everything that had happened I felt that it was time to move on and sell. Hiriketiya has become a buzzy, super-cool surfers paradise. It's still in the very early stages of development and my plot of land is right in the middle. You could say it's at the Hyde Park Corner of Hiriketiya. It's a fabulous project for someone else who will build a boutique hotel or restaurant.

7. What I learned

Sri Lanka is a stunning country full of wonderful people and this story has done nothing to diminish my love of it and them. If anything, I'm grateful to have re-connected with it and in a deeper way than before.

It is a well known fact that owning property abroad is expensive, difficult and time consuming. This sorry story only confirms that truth. But it is a one-off. A story of a few rogues taking advantage of one absent landowner and the whole episode could have been avoided if I had paid more attention and hired another property manager.

So, aside from these truths about Sri Lanka and owning a holiday property, I want to share some more general thoughts. Partly, because I do want something positive to come from this. And partly because I hope it will help someone else, at some time, with a negotiation or a problem they face in difficult circumstances.

On resilience

Supportive friends and concerned family WhatsApp'd and texted and emailed encouragement. Each one had the same message. "Go Jules. You can do it if anyone can. Someone with your energy should have no problem sorting this out."

It wasn't energy needed here though. It was doggedness. Patience. An ability to bounce back from the latest hit of bad news. A willingness to accept local norms and adapt to them. Forgiveness of oneself when it seemed I'd never get it right, and the strength to start again the next day.

My dear friend Tim, a successful British hotelier with a collection of exquisite boutique hotels, has lived and worked in Sri Lanka for ten years and has avoided all the usual pitfalls experienced by expats. I asked his advice early on. He said, some days you'll just want to curl up and cry but you keep on this every single day. If they say they'll call back by 2 o'clock and don't, call them. If they say it isn't done like that, don't assume you must do it their way but do it your way politely. If they say yes, and you know they mean no, ask someone else or go around them or think of another way to get it done. If you're not sure you've been understood, explain again. Drive it forward a little bit every day. This is how you get things done in paradise - where sometimes it all seems too hard and maybe a bit pointless.

On friends and enemies

It's so easy to divide the world into enemies and friends. We naturally try to simplify our lives by doing this but in a place like Sri Lanka, perhaps elsewhere too, its an over simplification and we risk losing opportunities by doing so.

In the course of this adventure, my relationship with the police, with the property management company and finally with K moved across the invisible lines that divide enemies from friends.

In Dale Carnegie's classic, "How to win friends and influence people" he talks about understanding the person that sits across the table by listening to them and showing that you see their point of view. It was published in 1936 and many books on management, marketing and sales have their roots in this book. Interestingly, it feels like the people I dealt with in Sri Lanka had a natural ability to change their view and their position in order to get things done and to maintain good relations with those around them.

A funny illustration of this came a few days after I bulldozed the house. I was swimming in the bay when I heard a familiar voice, "Good morning, Madam". It was the standard greeting but who could have guessed that it would come from the head roti shop boy, who had nearly scuppered my deal with K, stood in front of the bulldozer to stop it - and now was waving at me while he gave a surfing lesson!

On being present

Sri Lanka is run in WhatsApp, texts and Facebook. It's alarming how much is communicated about important and complex issues by lawyers, agents and the rest in abbreviated and imperfect English. Even when everyone shares a common language it's easy to make mistakes or jump to conclusions communicating this way. The possibility of misunderstandings when you don't share a mother tongue are rife. It makes meeting face to face the only real way to get things done.

I often found it difficult to understand the meaning of telephone conversations with my attorney when I was in the UK. There was only one way to get around this and that was to get on a plane. Being present is essential. It's hard for people to take you seriously if you're 5,500 miles away and it's hard for you to drive things forward effectively if you're not there to meet people.

K never responded to my voicemails and texts asking for a meeting. Probably, he saw communicating over the phone or in written English as a risk, both to his advantage over me and to his dignity. Luckily, I was able to get in front of him by asking his family and friends to reach out on my behalf. Only then could I start to understand how to work with him... and when to call his bluff. As an avid user of email, texts and WhatsApp, this experience has re-opened my eyes to the importance of real communication, face to face.

On rolling with the punches

I found one of the hardest things to deal with was the constant evolution of the situation. My brain ached from trying to understand a succession of different explanations about the law, about what I should do and how to do it and about the risks involved. The whole situation seemed to go through 100% revolutions, sometimes daily, especially towards the end. It often felt like I'd take one step forward and two steps back. It was bewildering. It demanded complete attention and absolute adaptability.

Maybe its because I'm not in my teens anymore, but it feels like adapting and rolling with the punches is getting harder. Things can move so fast today using social media and 24/7 communication that it can feel like an assault. I found the best way to deal with it was to write everything down. It's a great tool and one I've used often to comprehend complex issues.

After 90 days of events, I was getting good at flexing and learning. So by the time Sinhalese New Year was within sight, I was ready and I knew I had to grab it as a lever to get the deal across the line.

8. Thank yous.

First, thank you for reading this far. While I was there, it often felt like I was alone, but looking back I see I had so much help. Thanks to Nicola and Chris Crewe-Read, Tim Jacobson, Liam and Natalie Hill, Dennis McCarthy, Alison Forbes, Rob Dixon, Geoffrey Dobbs, Roshan Manjula, Nav Hennayake, Indike and Anil Koththagoda, Simon Senaratna, Adamaly Mohamed.