Opinion | When the little guys bulk up to payback bad treatment

One thing you can confidently say about Hong Kong's biggest landlords is that they are pretty consistent. They rarely, if ever, admit to fault and behave towards their smaller customers in a haughty manner.

There is a stronger way of putting this but the kind of vivid characterisation which applies here is hardly suitable for a family newspaper.

The reason I am back again talking about landlords is that many readers contacted me about a previous column on this subject to share experiences akin to the troubles my company was encountering with a big property company that, among things, was devising all manner of ways to avoid paying back a rental deposit.

This five-month saga has finally come to an end and we managed to get our money back, minus a deduction for "damage" unilaterally determined by the landlord without any form of verification of the alleged rectification costs.

So far, so bad, and in the interests of full disclosure, because it is always possible that not all big landlords behave in this way, I should say that company in question is a subsidiary of Sino Land. Having talked to other tenants in our building, I can report that we were not singled out for poor treatment.

Anyway, the time came when Sino finally ran out of excuses for not returning the money but even then big corporation arrogance was on full display.