Tax evasion, bribery and the mother of all family feuds

Dear members — what do the John O'Gaunt pub in Gleadless, the Hurlfield View Care Home, and roughly 500 derelict garages have in common?

All have been demolished, or are set to be demolished; and in every case the contractor who got the job is MHH Contracting Limited, paid for by Sheffield council. In recent years, the company has carried out hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of activity for the council.

If MHH rings bells, it might be because they came up in our recent piece about the Hague family, some of Sheffield’s wealthiest landowners. MHH is owned by Martin Hague, who came out on top when the family had an almighty falling out in 2009. 

Given the Hagues’ significant landholdings, and MHH's status as a major council contractor, we decided to keep looking into it. We still had lots of questions: what, exactly, caused the initial rift? When Martin Hague mentioned “lying and deceit”, what was he actually talking about?

Since then, there have been two major developments. The first is that we’ve uncovered the judgement from the original court case that began it all. It’s a truly extraordinary document, laying bare just what went so wrong. As the two sides of the family tried to damage the other in the judge’s eyes, details of major tax evasion, bribes, and a secretive multimillion pound hotel deal all spilled out (plus an extraordinary allegation that a dead cow was mutilated by blow torch to get insurance money.)

The second development is that, for the first time, a member of this highly secretive family has spoken to the press about just what has gone on in the Hague empire. “There’s been a lot of mud-slinging,” they told us.

The meeting took place on 21 September 2005. It was attended by the three Hague children: Martin, David and Dianne, plus their mother Jean, Martin’s wife Jean Angela, David’s wife Rosemary and Mr Midgley, the family’s long-time accountant. 

It was an annual fixture to discuss pensions — usually a pretty boring affair. But trouble had been brewing among the Hague clan.