Dear Peter
Ownership of the Domain: nemaritimetrust.co.uk
I made an excuse ten days ago that I had been distracted when I had omitted ‘deleted’ from an opening statement. I had thought to correct it but realised that it was made in response to a request that I delete all the documents relating to the NE Maritime Trust from our other website and thought that I’d indicated that I had started replacing them meant that the NEMT files had gone from it.
I was distracted because I had discovered in a very pleasant phone conversation with Nominet, the people who look after domain names, that I still owned the domain name nemaritimetrust.co.uk and the ownership of it had been extended from May this year to May 2027 and that had been done by a new service provider, Ionos.
I had to switch away from service provider, TSOHost, because when I pointed out to them that I had owned the domain for a good number of years they ducked the issue by saying that the issue had to be resolved between the NEMT and myself before they would take any action against the User chockerblock (Alec Renwick). He had somehow managed to convince them to make him the administrator of the site which I had always maintained and I did not notice that this had happened until Saturday 16th March 2024, when I discovered that I could no longer log into it.
The website had held the history of both our Trusts from about 2010 when NEMT wrote to the Charity Commission in support of the Northumbrian Fisheries Heritage Trust’s registration application and history of NFHT had sat comfortably as a sub set within NEMT since that time and while I could no longer log into it, I could view it and noticed that nearly all, though not quite all, of the history belonging to the two trusts up until the launch of the Henry Frederick Swan had gone.
All the pages devoted to NFHT had disappeared and more disturbingly nearly all the posts pre 2020 had been removed as well and it did not take long to realise that they had been deleted because they showed until that time, both Trusts had shared the same aims and had been seamlessly working together for a good number of years.
It was very obvious from Mr Barnard’s attack on your integrity on the 15th March and then mine on the 17th confirms that there was no way that the issue between those who control NEMT and myself could be resolved and it appears that he switched his attack from you to me when I wrote on the 16th:-
I think I can answer to the question, posed in your response to the email from Alec Renwick, NEMT Chairperson, what has gone wrong in the last two years?
The answer is the elevation of Mr Barnard to be the director of the Charity.
I had discovered that the Website had been taken out of my control with the assistance from someone from TSOHost or to quote directly from Mr Renwick stolen from me that morning and I went on to suggest:-
It has never been his (Mr Renwick’s) or their website. Nemaritimetrust.co.uk has been in my name from the time that NEMT became a charity and there is nothing Messrs Renwick and Barnard can do about it, that is, if they desire to keep the North East Maritime Trust as a charity.
The troubles that the NFHT have had with NEMT stem from the time of that Gordon Brown left his pair of flats in Dinsdale Road to the two Trusts when he instructed that the bequest of the two properties was to provide income for both trusts, knowing that neither had regular income. One would expect one of the flats to be given to NEMT and the other to NFHT but one had to be sold to pay for the other to be made suitable to let.
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A just solution would have been to share remaining property and the sum left from the sale of the other, after all the costs had been deducted, between the two trusts but it never happened because NEMT were given the remaining property and the balance left after the sale of the other property given to NFHT. This was not fair because the latter Trust would have had no control of the spending on the remaining property given to the first Trust and the situation was further aggravated by the refusal of NEMT to hand over the balance to NFHT until I interceded in January 2023.
If the settlement was going to be divided in the way it was done, it would have made more sense to have given remaining property to NFHT and for NEMT to hang onto the balance left from the sale of the other property. Whoever took the decision to go against Gordon’s wishes did not clearly wish well of NFHT as we can clearly see from what followed especially when one notes that Gordon passed away in May 2016 and at a board meeting in May 18 the Trustees of NEMT a resolution was passed. I as secretary of NFHT was told a day or so later:-
That NEMT would sell the upper flat and retain the lower flat for its sole use in the future. NEMT would make a donation to NFHT of the proceeds of the sale of the upper flat of an amount equal to the monies realised from the sale, less an amount to defray all costs of renovation of both flats up to the point of sale, including all professional, legal and estate agents’ fees, council tax, utilities, loan costs and interest etc.
Jerry Dudman, Secretary NEMT, 22nd May 2018
As you can see, things were not going to go well for NFHT when the NEMT Trustees decided to keep all the income from the lower flat to themselves but he had added, “As this confirms NFHT’s proposal to us, I trust that you will find it a satisfactory way” I realised that there was not a lot I could do about it but sadly he passed away in March 2020 and it was two years before I discovered the real diving force behind the unfair division of Gordon’s bequest.
I had realised that something was going badly wrong with the management of the North East Maritime Trust when Alec Renwick refused to let me have a copy the minutes of the AGM held on 10th September 2022 but happily let me have the Notice of Proposals 1&2 which had been agreed at a NEMT meeting on Friday 25th of November 2022 and it was the second proposal which caused me concern:-
Proposal 2
Our research indicates that credit which has been available to NFHT since its contribution to
the boatshed in 2017 and further agreed at meeting in 2019 is to be reassessed.
This credit has in fact been far surpassed by the amount of time used and work already carried out jointly by NEMT and its members’ volunteer labour to the benefit of NFHT.
It is therefore intended to draw a line under any assumed credit available to NFHT.
Any objection to these proposals should be made in writing no later than 7th January 2023.
Alec Renwick. Chairperson.
Put simply, Mr Renwick intended to write off somewhere between 14 and 18 thousand pounds that they owed NFHT.
The first item on the minutes of the AGM held on the 25th March 2023 Mr K Lund reported:
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Consideration of the minutes of the Annual General Meeting of 24th, month missing?, 2022: Agreed without objection.
The meeting was on the 20th September 2022 and Mr Lund was not present at the meeting of the 25th March because apparently he had been made a Trustee in his absence but he went on to add under, Any Other Business, Item b:
M Dawson raised a question about why NEMT couldn’t pay NFHT an assumed debt owing “due to NEMT having over £48.000 in the bank” in reply, the Chairman pointed out that the accounts quite clearly state that his assumption was incorrect and that a payment was soon to be agreed with NFHT anyway.
I and most of the other members of NEMT who attended the meeting can confirm that I hardly spoke at all and I certainly did not address the Chair, Mr A Renwick and one has to ask why the minutes of the 2023 AGM no longer reflected the truth behind Mr Renwick’s Chairmanship of NEMT and hides the reason why refused to let me have a copy of the minutes of 2022 AGM.
The truth is that I had made an objection to the proposals made on the 25th November 2022 where it was stated:-
It is therefore intended to draw a line under any assumed credit available to NFHT.
In plain language, I was objecting to the fact that NEMT intended to keep the share of Gordon’s bequest that they owed the NFHT which amounted to somewhat over £14k and it landed in his mailbox on the 6th January, 2023 under the title of, Objection to proposed fraud by the charity – NEMT and I concluded the email:-
This is a written objection and whether one calls the arbitrary cancellation of a debt embezzlement, misappropriation or theft, it is still a criminal offence.
M Dawson
It was very obviously written as a personal email/letter to him as the Chair of the Trust but his response the same day was not plausible, first he makes an excuse for not making the minutes of the 2022 AGM available, then goes on the attack:-
Further to your slanderous accusations.
Please supply the evidence you use to form these beliefs.
Please be aware that should any more deflamatory allegations be made we will take advice with a view to legal action.
A day later I receive another and rather disconcerting email from which I reproduce here, in full:
From: Alec Renwick <alec.renwick@gmail.com>
Sent: 07 January 2023 10:22
To: Michael Dawson <daw50nmdj@hotmail.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Objection to proposed fraud by the charity – NEMT
Dear Mr Dawson
Further to your previous emails.
Can you tell me if this is your personal opinion or does it represent the case for NFHT.
Also, in future, I will be pleased if you can reply to the following email address not my personal email – nemaritime2020@gmail.com
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Disconcerting in two ways; first he says previous emails, then he asks that I stop using his personal email:-
- my previous email to him in November 2021 and finished:- “Hope all goes well with your trip to London and if I get anything back from TSO, I will wait for you to get back to me before I do anything;
- the introduction of the new email address ‘nemaritime2020’, indicated that he had been planning to withhold all or most of the £14k that NEMT owed NFHT I as far back as 2020.
Two things had changed since he had returned from London and the first was that I had re-established the administrative control of the website nemaritimetrust.co.uk with TSOHost and Mr Barnard had been made a Trustee of the NE Maritime Trust and take a look at the third response to my personal email to Mr Renwick of the 6th January which was not from him but from Mr Barnard made a new subject, Slanderous Accusations:-
Dear Sir, I am a trustee of NEMT and as such am one of the people against whom you are making the grounds less, mindless accusations.
My previous occupation and position make these accusations all the more offensive and a greater attack on my integrity.
I have never ever spoken to Mr Barnard and he has never had any emails from me. I had written privately to Mr Renwick on January the 6th and his first response was to claim that I had been making further slanderous accusations when I had not made any in the first place. I had claimed in writing, that for the Trustees to write-off the debt to NFHT, was a simple misappropriation of funds and concluded my email to Mr Renwick with:-
Why the other signatories wish to keep what is rightfully the NFHT’s is shameful to say the least and you would do well not to associate yourself with such criminal activity.
I had given Mr Renwick the option of dissociating himself from the likes of Mr Barnard but the subsequent attacks by both of them on my integrity shows that he had chosen not to do so. It was shortly after this exchange that NEMT did pay what was due to the NFHT but regrettably there were no apologies from either Mr Renwick nor Mr Barnard and until there is an apology from them there is no way that any issue between NEMT and myself can be resolved.
Two years and a couple of months on, we discover that that Mr Renwick has not learnt that to give misrepresentation for profit is a criminal offence because the it appears that he misled the service provider TSOHost when he told them that I was not a member of NEMT to gain control of the nemaritimetrust.co.uk and he promptly began to accuse me of carrying out the deletions that he had made in the few days that he had control of the site.
He left me with no alternative but to replace TSOHost with another service provider and as I said at at the beginning I chose Ionos and they started a WordPress installation for me but I soon discovered that they, WordPress, wanted paying to associate nemaritimetrust.co.uk with any site I built with them and if it was a one off payment I would have gone ahead, but they want a yearly subscription which I will have to think about and for the time being if anyone clicks on the NEMT logo they just get the Coming Soon screen.
I do not think you know but on 26th March, Mr Renwick told the truth for once:-
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From: Alec Renwick alec.renwick@nemaritimetrust.org.uk
Sent: 26 March 2024 11:06
To: Michael DAWSON daw50nmdj@hotmail.co.uk
Cc: Kevin Lund kevin.lund@nemaritimetrust.org.uk; Keith Barnard keith.barnard@nemaritimetrust.org.uk; Dr Griffiths, Sue sue.griffiths121@gmail.com
Subject: Membership
Michael
After checking our up to date membership record, it does confirm that your membership is paid up until October. So apologies for the delay in getting back to you.
However, with a view to your recent actions, future membership compatibility will be discussed at our next Trustee meeting on 30th April.
With regards
Alec Renwick
I have published it in full to show you that NEMT now only has four Trustees and Sue Griffiths is the odd one out as she does not share the nemaritimetrust.org.uk email address with the others and she would do well to make herself absent from the meeting especially if she still maintains the accounts for the charity NEMT.
Kind regards
Mick
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