See you in Court: The postscript

One final post about last night's Rent Tribunal appearance.
We left the Court at the same time as the landlord's representative and he got into the lift with us. As the lift headed down he leant over and said to Colin in a very hushed, confidential tone "Don't worry Sir, I can help you."
Don't worry Sir, I can help you?? WTF does that mean??
I thought for an instant that I'd been transported into an episode of the Sopranos. "Don't worry Sir, I can help you."? What do you think he meant, did he mean something like "I can make all this disappear" or "I can get your satellite tv hooked up for free" or possibly even "I can have somebody whacked". Who knows?
Who's he kidding "....I can help you". We pay the money as instructed by the Court and khallas, the matter is over and done with.
"Don't worry Sir, I can help you". Good grief.

See you in Court Pt 1

Here's the background: Our previous landlord wouldn't drop the rent at the end of our 12 month lease, we tried to negotiate, he wouldn't budge and so we moved out. The place is still empty while weve moved to a nice place in the same area and paying AED70,000 a year less.

We've just received a phone call from the Dubai Municipality telling us that the landlord's agent (Rocky Real Estate) is taking us to Court - tomorrow. They want us to pay two months rent for not giving notice. We did give notice, two months prior to expiry we wrote to Rocky saying "We want to renew but not at the current rent", they wouldn't drop the rent so we moved out . Rocky is the same rental agency that sent repairman 18 times to fix the air-con in the house.

There's been no warning other than this morning's phone call so there's no time for us to prepare (of course) and all Court proceedings in Dubai are in Arabic so we have to find an Arabic lawyer to appear in Court tomorrow.

This is how its done here, the consumer has no rights.