Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Jun 20/01) - The North is a place where deals are still made on a handshake, but Dave Kellet will not be making that mistake again.
"My trust was betrayed," Kellet said. "You don't expect that kind of treatment from friends."
Kellet's name may ring a bell. It's on posters plastered around town notifying people of a sheriff's auction of a 17.5-foot, 140-horsepower Glastron speed boat.
He said the damage the posters have done to his reputation -- "I always pay my bills," said Kellet -- is the last of a string of losses he has suffered as a result of his misplaced trust.
In 1996, he paid $12,300 for the one-year-old vessel on a handshake and an understanding that the seller, whom he had known and worked with for years, would pay down the $5,000 still owing on it.
A year after the purchase -- made just before the 'friend' retired to Ontario -- he got a call from the bank that held the loan. They wanted their $5,000, or the boat.
That was the beginning of a stressful four-year battle with the bank and collection agencies.
"I'd hear from them at work, at home late at night, but it would be months, even to the end, between calls. It didn't seem like it was a big priority for them ... there have been a lot of sleepless nights."
Last October, Kellet returned home to find the boat, and the trailer it sat on, gone. It had been repossessed.
Two months ago he went to court to get the boat and his trailer back. His lawyer argued Kellet owned the boat outright because the lien had expired in 1998.
"It was more the principle of the thing," Kellet said of his reasons for going to court. "I didn't have a loan with the bank, but I was the one who ended up defaulting on a loan I never had."
The judge awarded the bank the boat and costs associated with selling it. Adding salt to Kellet's wound, the bank kept the trailer to ensure its costs were covered.
Kellet noted that while the bank was pursuing the boat, he could have turned around and sold it. Anyone who checked the personal property registry would have found nothing, since the lien was in name of the person he purchased it from.
Kellet's lawyer, Louis Walsh, said the new electronic personal property registry and the act that created it allow searches by the serial numbers of property as well as by the name of the apparent owner.
Yesterday was the deadline for sealed bids on the boat, drawing to a close a long and expensive lesson in business and trust.
