But in a normal case, one would have expected a settlement.
But how does any court - room have a lawyer present who claims to be a PRANUC employee but he says he's not working for PRANUC?
I don't think a court - room will be able to establish whether these declarations are true or not.
He then went on to say that he's working in a non - related position in China.
He went on to explain that he's the Solicitor of the JV Company and therefore if any 'Proceeds of Crime' or 'Wage Matters' are raised, they will be referred to him.
The lawyer stated that the fees are determined at the time of agreement of the transaction between the parties and if there is any loss, the client should seek a refund from the legal counsel.
The lawyer stated that the deposit was for half of the contract fee and that the agreement is subject to review and changes by the Client.
He then offered to deposit the balance fee in 5 installments and then referred to our JV as SSA Company and therefore if the work is not done, they would take the contract back and sue us.
So again, the recommendation was to pay the balance fee.
After all this, we decided to go to the office and seek clarification from the Lawyer.
But the Lawyer apparently didn't have time for us as he would be leaving in 30 minutes.
And he would not be available until Thursday.
So we left it with the JV Company.
That was when we started to receive the threats from the company.
The JV Company refused to entertain any change to the agreement and instead threatened us with litigation if we don't pay them the entire amount within the stipulated time.
But then that's when we decided to take it to the Lawyer and he tried to engage them.
In the end, he also failed to secure a settlement but we didn't pay the balance fee either.
Another reason we were in a fix was the fact that we didn't want to give the 'bastard' more time to claim from the deceased's family.
In order to raise more money to pay the fees, the Lawyer took us to China to sell the policy.
Afterwards, we paid him what we had in the Hong Kong bank and the balance fee in Singapore.
So all up, we were paying close to $12, 000 to a non - government legal representative.
But the Lawyer was desperate to take the case forward and we didn't want to give the bastard any more time to defraud another innocent party.
And so we went ahead with the mediation and eventually paid him the amount we owed.
The Lawyer also made it quite clear that we will be suing the JV Company and he will be defending the claims.
And when we had this signed agreement, we finally gave in and agreed to pay the fees that he requested.
Though the Lawyer warned us that the JV Company would later 'falsify the documents' and stop working with us.
I think he knows more than we do about their bad business practices.
We should have ended it there but we had a major hurdle to face.
When we were handed over the papers for the Settlement, we were told that the entire balance fee would go to the Divorce Lawyer's Client.
We were quite surprised and said we didn't sign for anything like that.
And after much persuasion, we managed to ascertain that the entire fee was being taken care of by the JV Company's Divorce Lawyer.
We were asked to pay the bill only as payment for the completion of the documentation and not as final settlement fee.
But we were scared to death and had no choice but to agree to it.
We just wanted to get the matter over with.
And this issue was something which we didn't want to drag on for a long time.
The Divorce Lawyer's Client also paid the entire settlement fee that the Lawyer requested.
The end result was that we were told that if we paid him $60, 000 in total (settlement fee and the fees for the Divorce Lawyer) he will take the case to the final level.
Since we were paying the Divorce Lawyer's bill, it was totally impossible for us to pay this last bill for the Divorce Lawyer's Client.
But the Divorce Lawyer's Client insisted that we pay him the balance fee as the settlement agreement clearly stated that all fees were to be paid in full.
At the end of it all, I paid $2000 and we were told that the next payment would be for $16, 000.
Once we paid the $16, 000, we would finally have to face the JV Company's lawyer.
