Holly HY / 06 August 2024 / Categories: People, Business Leaders

Mr. Paul Dawson

CEO Agena and Premier Park

It’s amazing what you find out when you can be bothered to look.

My story about Paul Dawson begins several years ago. I haven’t thought about what happened for a while but haven’t completely got over it either.

From my experience of what looked like a great entrapment strategy I got straight on here to share what happened to me and hopefully give everyone some wider insight into how companies like Premier Park the company in charge of the car parking facilities at Grosvenor Casino Leicester, operate. And hopefully warn prepare other customers ahead of time so the same thing doesn’t happen to them.

It’s 6am, my business partner has a gig on BBC radio Leicester and I need to park and go and join him. I pull in the Grosvenor Casino Leicester, no barrier down which would indicate the car park is open right. I find my self unable to pay, the app is not working. I try to call. No answer. Now worried I have entered the car park, not paid, I leave immediately. I’ve been in the car park I’d say no more than 10 minutes. I get all the car park information off the board and keep trying to ring. After 5 or 6 attempts to speak to someone at Premier Park I finally get to leave a message explaining what has happened.

You can guess what happened next, penalty charge notice popped through the door for failure to pay my parking charges, baring in mind to park your car is actually defined as leaving it, I never left my car.

What happened next is probably the most disconcerting, I didn’t realise at the time, threat of legal action in these cases is a complete rouse, unless it’s the council, the tax man or the government after you, the threats of the bailiff and court proceedings are empty, just people like Paul Dawson making money at the expense of less affluent perhaps sometimes more vulnerable less well informed people.

Dealing with the debt collector was stressful, I tried to be completely reasonable explaining exactly what had happened. No surprise they were having non of it. The way they spoke to me, I don’t think I’ve ever been spoken to like that before.

Most people would have just paid the bill at this point but I was furious so I set about finding out about Premier Park and the people in charge.

It wasn’t easy to find out but after doing a load of research I discovered Sovereign Capital and Agena were the holding company with Mr. Dawson at the helm. I had to write three registered letters to different addresses before I got a reply which although explained the reason this had happened, the car park didn’t open until 9am (why I couldn’t pay for my parking on the app even though the barrier was open) it did absolutely nothing to sort out the issue.

They said the debt was still outstanding.

There are more and more companies set up like Premier Park with systems in place to potentially really hurt the consumer, like when telephones that don’t get answered and CEO’s that don’t reply to correspondence and are all about the money instead.

Since this happened, about 5 or 6 years ago now the “debt” has popped up a few times with different debt and legal companies, obviously the “debt” has been sold on and different companies keep trying to collect in with different styles, some authoritative and scary, some more concerned and wanting to help sort it out in tone.

For me I just wanted everyone to be aware if you find your self being threatened by a big company when you haven’t done anything wrong and cannot get anyone to listen to you don’t be bullied into paying. Tell them you’ll happy face them in court and put the phone down. Avoid allowing them access to your phone number or personal email. Companies use these to pick on you and press you into submission.

This was a very ugly messy situation with debt collectors bullying me but I never paid it and it didn’t affect my credit. The company who have now bought the debt are BW Legal. However I have not heard from them for over 2 years now.

So happy to get that out.