MILLIONAIRE neighbours are locked in a four-year legal battle costing £70,000 over whether a garden fence should be moved six inches.
Property developer Patrick Doyle, 62, moved the panel while carrying out a renovation on his new four-bedroom home in Ealing, West London.
When the fence wasn’t replaced at the end of construction, his neighbours Janusz, 61, and Elzbieta Wajda, 59, replaced it themselves outside their £1.7million house.
But Patrick accused them of “trespassing” on to his land – despite the neighbours insisting they put it back in exactly the same place.
He has now forked out £60,000 trying to get the fence moved in a spiralling legal battle at Central London county court.
The developer is asking a judge for the partition to be put “along the correct boundary line as originally agreed”.
But Janusz and Elzbieta, who have run up £10,000 legal costs in the four-year fight, insist they have done nothing wrong and want Patrick to pay for the work putting the fence back in the first place.
The court was told construction boss Patrick paid almost £1million in 2014 for the land and had no issues with his new neighbours at first.
But the row erupted when he needed to remove the boundary fence while building his garage after ten months passed without it being replaced.
The couple claim they emailed Patrick asking for it to be restored but in the end hired workers to re-erect the wood and panel fence.
Janusz told the court: “My wife asked me to put it up — she didn’t like the brickwork.”
Patrick’s lawyer Ben Maltz says the developer “asserts that the Wajdas have positioned the fence so as to encroach on the land, such that it sits atop a ground level drainage pipe serving his property.”
While Nick Grant, for the Wajdas, insists the fence is in the right place and the pipe has been installed on the couple’s side of the property.
He added: “[It was] reinstated to its original position, is not a trespass and that the pipe is a trespass.”
But Mr Maltz fired back: “In the course of you erecting this fence, my client said: ‘that’s not where the fence should be going – stop or I will have to take legal action’.
“But you just carried on and did it. Was that conducive to settling the dispute?”
Mr Wajda replied: “If Mr Doyle wanted to settle the matter, he could have instructed a surveyor.”
He also claimed he agreed to move the fence by 50mm while it was being erected when first challenged about its position.
The court was told the couple have lived in the lavish home since 2002 and have a detailed survey showing where the boundary lies.
The judge has now reserved his decision in the case, to be given at a later date.
