IT has taken since 2009, but Adamstown man Robert Mitrevski has finally received $9000 in legal costs from the NSW government after a Land Titles Office mixup saw a house he owned at Jesmond almost seized by creditors chasing another Robert Mitrevski in Sydney.
In its written offer of August 26 the Office of the Registrar General agrees a writ was "erroneously recorded" over Mr Mitrevski's property but says the Registrar General is of the view it was not the fault of the Land Titles Office".
The $9000 payment was made "without admission of liability".
The Newcastle Herald's coverage of Mr Mitrevski's ordeal began in May 2009, after a Sydney couple, George and Vera Barkovski, had obtained a $2.7 million Supreme Court judgement against another Robert Mitreveski, a Sydney developer with no links - beyond the same first and last names - to the Novocastrian.
As part of this process, the Barkovskis were allowed to lodge writs over nine properties - eight associated with the Sydney developer, but the ninth being a rental investment property at Janet Street, Jesmond, owned by the Adamstown Mitrevski.
The Barkovskis had gone to a Land Titles Office in Sydney to obtain the details of the other Mr Mitrevski's properties and said the clerk at the counter had assured them the details were correct.
Mr Mitrevski said it was "coincidence" and "luck" that he found out about the writ that April, a month after it was lodged, when he went to his St George bank branch at Kotara to increase an existing loan.
He had wanted to extend the mortgage on the Jesmond property to do some renovations and to buy a car. Mr Mitrevski is now 50. As a young man he was a familiar face on the Hunter nightclub scene as a disc jockey at The Jolly Roger, the Grand Hotel and Maitland's Bojangles.
"I had banked with St George since 1987. I had saved to get the deposit for the house and I had the mortgage with them. I was a good customer, and suddenly they're treating me like a criminal, telling me to 'come clean' on the other properties I had they I had never told them about," he said on Saturday.
"They didn't want to believe I didn't have an idea what they were talking about. At first I thought the loans officer was making some sort of joke, saying 'Robert we are not going to lend you any more money but then I realised he was serious and that they thought I was trying to defraud them."
Mr Mitrevski approached the Herald soon after to tell people to make sure they had their full name on any legal documents.
"If the house was registered in the name of Robert Steven Mitreveski it probably wouldn't have happened," Mr Mitrevski said in 2009.
With the Barkovskis not willing to take the writ of his property - "they thought initially I was involved, maybe his cousin or something - he had to engage a lawyer to get the matter sorted out.
The cost over time was well over the $9000. Initially believing he would be recompensed for the error, Mr Mitrevski found he had to keep fighting.
His local state member at the time was the late Matthew Morris, Labor MP for Charlestown. He helped Mr Mitrevski apply to the Attorney General's office for an ex gratia payment.
But as we reported then, the Attorney-General's department said that while he had suffered financially because of the mix up, he was not entitled to an ex gratia payment because, "it is not as a result of an error by the Supreme Court (and) . . . Mr Mitrevski could still take action to mitigate the loss".
He contacted the Herald again in January 2011 when the NSW Ombudsman's office alerted him to a specialist fund that existed to compensate people in such situations, the government's Torrens Assurance Fund.
After an initially promising discussion, the fund eventually decided against a payout, and it has taken another 11 years - and the efforts of Jodie Harrison, the third consecutive Charlestown MP to take up his case - for him to make some progress.
'I'm relieved to see the money in my account," Mr Mitrevski said on Saturday at Adamstown, where he lives as a full-time carer for his ageing parents. Believing he needed to get the rental property "out of my system" he finally sold it last year.
"But $9000 in 2009 was a lot more money than $9000 is now in 2022," Mr Mitrevski said
"In the agreement that was signed last month we asked for $7585 which was what it cost me with my original solicitor at the time, plus $2000 for out-of-pocket expenses for motel costs and petrol on various trips to Sydney in 2009 to try to sort it out, and interest on the legal fees which we calculated to be $7188.75.
"After Jodie Harrison had written to them, the lady at the Office of the Registrar General said 'I've got some good news for you Robert, we are going to pay you.
"But when I spoke to her boss the next morning, she said we will give you $8000. I said 'you're joking!' and she said 'we can't afford any more'. They can't afford any more? That's insane! But they weren't going to budge. I said $10,000 and she said 'I'll tell you what, Robert, we will meet you half-way. $9000.
"I really do not think that was fair, but when you have been through something like this for so long, my new solicitor, John Palmeri, who I cannot thank enough, said: 'Bird in the hand, Robert', so I said yes."
Mr Mitrevski said throughout the ordeal, everybody involved - the government, the lawyers, the people in the Sydney dispute and his bank - all pointed to the other.
He said he moved his mortgage from St George a few years after the writ, and had tried to claim the interest on the $9000 in legal costs, which had come from his mortgage and had to be repaid.
But in its latest rejection letter, St George said last month that the "error was not made by the bank nor were we involved in any way. "This had no effect on your credit file or ability to borrow additional funds from us," the bank complaint officer wrote.
In seeking a government response, the Herald was directed to the office of Victor Dominello, Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government, Small Business, and Fair Trading.
His office yesterday repeated the government's consistent position that it had not been at fault.
"The Registrar General empathises with Mr Mitrevski's position and the Office of Registrar General has had regular discussions with Mr Mitrevski on this issue," a spokesperson for the Office of the Registrar General said.
"The writ on Mr Mitrevski's property in 2009 was an error by the persons lodging the writ who had not identified the correct individual. This was not an error by the Land Titles Office.
"The Registrar General, however, made the decision to make a payment to Mr Mitrevski under the Torrens System in acknowledgement of the hardship associated with this lodgement."
Ms Harrison told the Herald yesterday that she had helped Mr Mitrevski, but in the end it was his own persistence that paid off.
"We wrote and the initial response was another no," Ms Harrison said. "But there was a contact number to ring at the bottom of that letter, and we said 'there's an opening for you, you should ring it, and he did."
Ms Harrison said she didn't know why this approach succeeded when others had failed.
She and others have suggested the government may have been worried about creating a precedent if this was not the only mistake of its type.
The Herald asked Mr Dominello's office about this but it said there was nothing to add to its existing statement.
Andrew Cornwell, who was Charlestown MP from March 2011 to his resignation during ICAC's Operation Spicer inquiry in August 2014, said his efforts to help included taking Mr Mitrevski to a meeting with Land Titles officers in Sydney.
He said the saga showed why people should "always stand up to big government to protect their own rights".
"It's like the movie The Castle," Mr Cornwell said.
"I'm so proud Robert has been so determined to fight for his rights. He is the Hunter's own Darryl Kerrigan."
In 2017, then premier Gladys Berejiklian and her treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, announced they had privatised the Land Titles Office in a $2.6 billion deal that saw a consortium of Hastings Fund Management and First State Super obtain a 35-year "concession" to run the business.
Asked if he had concerns about data safety since the privatisation, Mr Cornwell said the Mitrevski case had "resulted in the system being tightened but we may never know how many other cases like Robert's are out there".
Mr Cornwell is back as a suburban vet after his brief stint in politics, and in 2018 he claimed "exoneration" when no charges arose after ICAC.
He said this experience showed him how powerless an individual could be once "the powers that be" had decided on a narrative.
"In both Robert's case and mine, it felt like you were trapped in a George Orwell novel," Mr Cornwell said.
"It demonstrates how fragile our democracy is and why we all owe a debt to the Robert Mitrevskis of the world."
WHAT DO YOU THINK? We've made it a whole lot easier for you to have your say. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on the Newcastle Herald website. Find out how to register so you can enjoy civil, friendly and engaging discussions. Sign up for a subscription here.
