Missing building permit when buying home

[hijacker]

My situation is; I've decided to buy a flat but I'm not a British citizen and not very familiar with the laws and regulations here, so this makes the situation a bit more difficult for me. I viewed a flat in a quite big block which is 4 years old and has around 100 flats. The estate agency advertising the property is part of a UK wide chain and the owner of the house is a repossession company. I put an offer through, the seller accepted it and I paid the initial fees to the agency for mortgage arrangement/advices and the solicitor they suggested for the initial investigation and paper work. Within 3 weeks my mortgage was approved by the lender, however my solicitor noticed that the seller doesn't have a copy of the building permit of the flat they are selling. The lender doesn't accept to lend me the money without the permit (without it I wouldn't be buying this property anyway) and the seller doesn't want to apply to council to ask for the permit (they are talking about jeopardising the permit of the whole block but I don't quite understand why) and doesn't authorise my solicitor to talk to the council. The seller's solicitor also claims that this is perfectly legal and not an obstacle to close the deal. I asked my solicitor to verify this information and what she said is, if it's an individual selling a property, then they are obliged to provide the permit but repossession companies are not. The only option left is contacting the builder and requesting the permit from them, so my solicitor is chasing this now. The things I want to know are;


- Is what the repossession company doing (trying to sell a property without the building permit) really legal? Can I sue them for this?
- The estate agency which advertises the flat is the same agency I paid for the mortgage arrangements and advices. However, they came to know that the seller didn't have such an essential document at the very last minute. Aren't they responsible for checking the legal documents of the seller (proof of ownership, building permit, approval from lender to sell etc) before starting to advertise a property?

- The forms I signed clearly state that I can't claim the initial money I paid to the agency and solicitor back. However, in this situation, I think both the seller and the agency are responsible for this problem. So, would this give me any legal right to claim my expenses? I think it is quite less likely in this case (a nation wide agency and a repossession company teaming up for only a couple of hundreds pounds of scam) but if there are no regulations for this, sellers and agencies can easily do such scams.

Thanks in advance,


Jack.