Just recently I have purchased a French 2006 Mitsubishi L200 for a what seemed to be a reasonable sum from an english man in London.
Everything seemed legit he had the carte gris, CT and I had performed the french equivalent of the HPI check which came back clear.
However when I toddled on down to the Sous-prefecture in Thonon-les-bains, i was asked did you purchase this vehicle from this person (company name) and she pointed to the name of the chaps french business. I said yes, she then directed me to another name in the form of a 3 initialed name of a finance company! To me it just looked like another code on the carte gris, i was not to know :(
After the initial shock she said i should go away and contact the seller and ask him why he has sold this vehicle that was not his to sell, or at least in his name anyway.
She then advised me that i would need to contact the finance company directly and it may be the case that there is no outstanding debt on the vehicle.
the plot thickens, after digging a little deeper it would seem that the French wine company that was based in Calais has in fact gone under and is no longer trading...
Have a made a complete blunder and been ripped off??
anyone out there who can offer any advice or some direction as to how i even begin to resolve this would be so very gratefully received.
I am sorry that my suggested "possibility" looks as if it is correct. So the question is what do you do now?
On the face of it, with the information you have put on here your "english man in London" has committed a fraud by selling you a vehicle he did not/does not own and is also guilty of the theft of your money paid in good faith to acquire the vehicle. Those are both criminal offences, in France and in the UK.
I would say that the best you can hope for is to get your money back, and that might be difficult, but maybe not impossible, and you will have to return the vehicle to the rightful owner. It may be possible to negotiate the purchase from the leasing company, at least it would be worth a try.
If you would like some help, the bilingual helpline would be pleased to take this challenge on your behalf. But we cannot do this on the forum, apart from anything else your "vendor" might be a member of SFN and be watching the subject unfold right now.
If you would like to discuss this further, get in touch via my profile page or telephone the infoline number you will find at the foot of each page of the LeLingo.fr website.
I have run the siv.gouv.interior.fr check on the name listed as the owner on the carte gris (C.1)which turns out is the leasing company, and received this response:
Situation administrative du véhicule: La situation administrative du véhicule ne fait apparaître aucune particularité : absence de gage et d'opposition.
Whose name was on the cession de véhicule as the vendor? Did/does that tally with the name on the carte grise?
This is quite important, or I may be missing something - if so, sorry.
As for Hilary Whitford, I've known Hilary for some time and her oral and written English, French (and German) is impecable. Please don't let this thread turn into a rant against Hilary. She gives and has given extensive advice to ex pats for many, many years and helped them enormously - for free :)
I've worked for several French companies over the last decade plus and although I am extremely confident about my written and oral English I always asked for a colleague to check my written French. Over the last few months I've had some very serious problems to deal with including tribunals and Hilary has - for free - corrected (indeed rewritten!) my original French draft letters. Ease up guys - she's one of the good guys.
May I have my fun then? Grammatically it should be 'professional' not 'professionally' and also 'well written' without the hyphen. Pots and kettles perhaps, since I make more than my share of errors. However, defending one person and going for the metaphorical jugular of another requires dexterity and a degree of accuracy rather than a 'cudgel'.
I am suspecting we might need a couple of 'troll alerts' here. Suddenly there are three 'faceless' ones with seemingly the same agenda? As we used to say in Oz, 'stirring the possum'?
This post is supposed to be all about trying to help James Robertson who has a serious problem with a car he purchased and I think it would be good if we could all get back to helping him, rather than concentrating all this wordpower on ‘some people’ intent on scoring points, being rude and offensive.
Anthony Murphy’s posts speak reams about himself. People who live in glass houses should avoid throwing stones.
It might be of interest to some of you to know that a couple of weeks ago a woman calling herself Andrea ( Andrea Haft?) telephoned me on the www.Lelingo.fr infoline to ask me how I ran my business, how many clients I had and explained that she was fed up with helping ungrateful people on the forum for nothing and did I have a job for her? Rather than refuse her on the spot, I asked her to send me her CV, which surprisingly I have not yet received. On a practical note I hope the text will be “well written” as opposed to “well-written” (sic) - compound adjective after the noun - no hyphen!
Less than an hour later I received a telephone call from from Hilary Whitford explaining that her friend (Andrea?) had just called and pumping me for the same information but in a much more direct manner. She even laughingly thanked me for providing a business model through my website which she could now follow. You will all be surprised to learn that I politely avoided giving her any useful answers and bid her a good day - in French.
I'm with you on this one Norman. I love a good scrap & have thoroughly enjoyed this debate. I do think though that it's not on to attack somebody whose hands are metaphoricaly tied behind their backs by the T & C's of this forum.
I wet myself thinking about the faceless Ms Whitford charging 50 euro per page to proof read dirty marks on her screen. The mind boggles!!!
Maybe Catherine ( I hope I am by now allowed to call you that) we could have one gloves off no holds barred day per month/year when people could vent their anger & give others a good laugh.
You can turn the phone around, hold it at arm's length and take the photo yourself, Hilary. It may be a little lopsided but we won't mind that in the least. We're a very friendly bunch here and would love to see you.