What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (83 page)

I was shocked. There I was, on the brink of selling the house without consulting Ann, who had gone off shopping. I refused to shake the guy's hand
there and then and told him that while his offer was interesting, I would need to consult with my wife.

That night at dinner I confessed to Ann that the house I had casually bought several years earlier when I went out to get some plasters from the drug store had almost been sold, this time while
she
was out shopping. She was surprised and a bit angry. 'What? You sold my house?'

But after a bit of a discussion, she agreed that perhaps we
had
got ourselves into a rut, constantly coming to Florida. Perhaps we should spread our wings a bit and choose different holiday destinations, especially bearing in mind that we now owned a boat. So I sold the house to this fellow and during the remainder of our stay in Florida we arranged for a removals company to pack up some of our things and ship them back to England.

However, over the course of the next few months, Ann and I reflected on the many happy years we'd spent in Florida and realised we'd made a mistake. A friend of mine, Harvey Gilbert, was intent on acquiring a home in Florida in a very up-market community known as Royal Palm, in Boca Raton, right next to the famous Boca Raton Hotel and Club. In September 1998, I told Ann to go with Harvey's wife to investigate the possibility of buying a new house at Royal Palm for us too. Then I flew out to see the house she had found, which was halfway through construction and in a great location on the inter-coastal waterways.

The salesperson was a real Rottweiler. She was working on behalf of a developer and put together a proposition for us. Having looked at the house in its part-constructed state, I agreed a deal. However, there were a few twists and turns to come, resulting in her having to bring the boss of the developing firm along to try to close the deal.

I'm not sure whether it's peculiar to Florida, but the people developing houses there are somewhat slippery. I could tell this Rottweiler-style real estate agent had done some research on me - she was mentioning things like Amstrad and Tottenham Hotspur - and had found out that I had plenty of money. She decided to jack up the price by making outrageous suggestions, saying Ann had requested finishes above and beyond the standard finishes offered - all bollocks.

I'd never seen Ann get very angry with anybody, but even
she
realised, having been part of the discussions on speccing out the house, that this woman was lying through her teeth. It was interesting to see Ann getting excited and telling this woman off. Normally she would never get involved in arguing over matters of finance. That might give you a measure of how tricky this woman was.

At the closing meeting in the lawyer's office, the agent produced a list of what she claimed were
extras,
costs we'd never agreed to pay, and I had a flaming row with her. She pathetically attempted to call the deal off by slamming her file closed and standing up, at which point I told her she could stick the house where the sun doesn't shine, an expression Americans don't seem to understand.

'I beg your pardon?'

'Okay, let me put it in simple terms - stick the house up your arse!'

Finally, her lawyer calmed the situation down and we exchanged contracts at the agreed price.

A friend of mine there, Zvi Levine, told me, Alan, you have to expect this in Florida. Once people know who you are, they simply put the price up.'

I've had many debates with Zvi over this. He can't understand why I'm so puzzled. I told him, 'In England, if you call a builder or a contractor to paint your house, it doesn't matter whether the house is located in the finest road in London or out in the sticks - the cost of the paint and the hourly rate is pretty much the same.'

'No, it doesn't work that way in Florida. First of all, they look at your house, see where it's positioned, then they pluck a figure from the air to see whether you'll pay it.'

'Well, she certainly picked on the wrong person here.'

There was one more hurdle before the deal was final. I hadn't realised the Royal Palm and Country Club, where this house was situated, was a private organisation. The Royal Palm Association needed to 'approve' me to be an owner on their estate and a rather strange procedure ensued. Ann and I had to be interviewed to see whether we were
acceptable people
to live within the Royal Palm community.

I was given a bunch of forms to fill out prior to the interview. Typical of Americans, who don't recognise that anything outside America exists, I was asked to put forward various references from US citizens who could give a good testimony about me. These references were required to guarantee that I was capable of paying the association's $800 a year charge for communal landscaping! Having just spent $4m on buying the house and paying in cash, this ridiculous request wound me up.

As I have explained before, when trying to buy something or apply for something in America, you run up against their programmed ways of doing things. Despite telling people I'm not American, they still insist on asking for things like social security numbers, as if I am. They simply can't get their heads around dealing with foreign people - it really throws a spanner in
their works. Eventually, you learn there's no way of bucking the system - you have to play their game. So on the basis of'if you can't beat them, join them,' Ann and I both took a driving test in Florida, just to get a Florida driving licence and make our lives easier at times like this.

I was stuck as to who to put forward as my referees for the Royal Palm interview, as I didn't feel I knew any Americans well enough. Then I remembered the two famous Americans I
did
know and got into mischievous mode. I would ask Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates to write me letters for these local hobos. I called Rupert's office and explained this ridiculous situation to his secretary and asked her to tell Rupert this was more of a wind-up than anything else; I did a similar thing with Bill Gates's people. Sure enough, two letters were faxed to me and, together with a reference from Lloyds Bank, I attached them to the application form.

Ann and I turned up at the interview and presented all these documents. One fellow took a look at the letters from Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch and passed them to the other three committee members, who coolly tried to play it down. They got my point after I explained to them that I was English and their form wasn't applicable to foreign nationals wishing to live at Royal Palm. I suggested that perhaps they should learn to recognise that there is another place outside the United States, called England, and while they may consider it one of their colonies, people
do
live there and many of them are capable of paying $800 a year. It was quite a funny episode, but we obtained our approval.

*

The Western Digital case was now approaching. Once again, I needed to appear as a witness because of my heavy involvement in the running of Amstrad. In other large corporations, you'd never expect the boss to be so intimately involved in the details, but because I
was,
there was a lot of correspondence to be referred to between me and the bosses of Seagate and Western Digital over this disaster.

Seagate had tried to discredit me in their court case because of the colourful way I communicated in my fax messages over the course of the years. They felt this was a good weapon to use to try to persuade the judge that Amstrad was not a well-run company. This backfired on them, but it seemed Western Digital were about to pursue the same tactic. My lawyers in America told me I was going to be the star witness in what was to be a very technical case.

The hearing was in Orange County, California, so of course I had to fly
to Los Angeles. On the first day, we went into the judge's chambers to have a meeting. The courtroom (an overflow from the main courtroom in Orange County) was an old converted furniture store and the judge's chambers looked like something out of Steptoe and Son's living room - full of old junk. The six or so people attending this meeting included executives from Western Digital and the judge had to shuffle around to find us chairs to sit on. It was so casual, you'd never have believed we were there to discuss a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

The judge opened his drawer and took out a penknife, then out of a polythene bag he produced an apple. He started peeling the apple with his penknife while telling us all about his personal history, how he'd started as a young lad working in a building yard where they made bricks. As he didn't know any better, he was picking up the bricks with his bare hands and by the end of his first day, his hands were cut to pieces. His boss told him, 'That's the first lesson you learn, young man - you need to wear gloves in future.' I couldn't believe what I was listening to. This lunatic was telling us his life story and we had to sit there quietly and diligently because, after all, he
was
the judge.

When he finally got round to talking about the case, he spent a few minutes asking whether we could settle this matter before it went to trial. It was only then that I realised that no trial was going take place that week - this was merely an unofficial settlement meeting. I went berserk with my lawyers, asking why they'd schlapped me all the way from London - on a ten-hour flight - to sit here listening to this idiot. They could have quite simply told the judge, on my behalf, that any settlement discussions attempted in the past had been negative and we wanted to go to trial. I was very angry with them. I had to return to London and await the new date for the trial.

The Seagate trial in the UK was heard in front of a technical judge. In America, however, we had to plead our case in front of a jury of laymen. I suddenly realised how difficult it was going to be to get our story over and rely on twelve ordinary people to get their heads around the very detailed technical matters. The hearing was set for March 1999, which coincided with a visit I was making to Florida. I flew over to LA and spent two days giving evidence in this court case.

Just to give you a perspective of some of the evidence we put forward, there was a particularly damning document which was disclosed by Western Digital during the discovery process. This was an internal memo from Western Digital, the gist of which was along the lines of, 'The Amstrad engineers have been on the phone again. They have changed all the controllers over to
our ones and
obviously
the drives still don't work. The shit is going to hit the fan soon, once they find out we've sent them the rejected drives returned from Tandy Corporation, the ones with the formatting fault on them. I've avoided answering them for the past two weeks and have used the earthquake as an excuse. Please advise what our next move should be.'

Now, anyone with half a brain would say that disclosing
that
document was game, set and match to us. It categorically proved that Western Digital
knew
the drives they'd sold us were crap. Common sense should tell you that at that point, our lawyers should have stood up and said, 'Right, that's it, case over. Can the jury now please focus on the damage Western Digital has caused Amstrad?'

But no. The case continued for another two weeks, with people like Cliff Lawson and Mike Ray having to give evidence. Then the lawyer acting for Western Digital stood up and made his final speech, which was basically this: 'You have heard from this guy, Alan Sugar. He is a multi-millionaire from England, worth in the region of a billion dollars. Western Digital is a local company from Orange County, on hard times, employing fifteen hundred of your fellow townsfolk. Do you think it is right that Alan Sugar should get any money from this company?'

This final summation was outrageous. It wasn't
Alan Sugar
bringing an action, it was Amstrad the corporation bringing an action on behalf of its shareholders. It was no different than, for example, if Microsoft were to take someone to court for copying their software and the defence argued that the offender should be let off because Bill Gates is a multi-billionaire. However, that was the summation this guy made.

I wasn't at the trial when it finished and the jury was sent away. If I were, I would have gone bananas. When I read the transcript of what went on, I asked my lawyers why they didn't stand up and object to this rubbish and focus the jury on the memo and remind them what the case was about. They were bloody useless. The guy defending Western Digital was in a different class - he avoided all the technical stuff and brushed it under the carpet.

Initially, the jury came back hung, which was bad news. They were sent away again by the judge to make a final decision, which was: Western Digital had no case to answer.

All the weeks of pleading with the jury and showing them details of how Western Digital had shipped us junk, and all the technical explanations from the engineers we'd flown over from England were a total waste of time. At the end of the day the record book will show that Western Digital won the case. So maybe they would argue this means there was nothing wrong with
their drives. However, the record and transcripts of the case will also show we disclosed papers that any reasonable person would interpret as showing that some Western employees believed we were sold duff drives. Anyway, it seems this is what's called a home victory decided by a jury of local townsfolk whose decision was based not on technical facts, but on good old-fashioned loyalty. The twelve jurors were sympathetic towards the then ailing Western Digital company and were worried about the employees being out of work. That's the American judicial system for you. You can understand why someone like O. J. Simpson got off scot-free.