Rival shopkeepers granted separate alcohol licences despite ongoing legal dispute

Nicholas Thomas, Local Democracy Reporter

Two shopkeepers will be allowed to operate separate alcohol licences at a shop despite “the current acrimony between them”, councillors have decided.

Senthuran Navayugan applied for a new licence to sell booze at Maindee Convenience Store, at 4-5 Maindee Road, Cwmfelinfach, claiming he was the main person responsible for trading there.

But Caerphilly County Borough Council’s licensing committee heard objections from another shopkeeper, Theepa Jegatheeswaran, who said she already held a licence for the premises.

The committee heard the pair were involved in an ongoing civil legal dispute over the ownership of the business.

Nick Semper, representing Mr Navayugan, told the committee the relationship between the two shopkeepers had “broken down”, and the objection to the new licence neither “challenges or criticises in any way” his client’s running of the store.

Naga Rajesh, representing Mrs Jegatheeswaran, alleged she had been “pushed away” from the business for a time, and claimed the new application was submitted “in bad faith” to “unilaterally establish an authority over the premises” in the wider legal dispute.

He urged the committee to refrain from issuing a decision until the wider legal dispute had been resolved.

But members of the committee voted unanimously to grant Mr Navayugan the new licence, after giving “significant weight… to the absence of any sustained opposition” from the police and various council departments.

They accepted “on the face of it, there may be an ever-present risk of initial ambiguity as to which licence was operating at the relevant time” if any issues arose at the store.

But they said, after “careful consideration, there were safeguards in place to readily resolve such initial ambiguity”.

Practically, the two shopkeepers are “unlikely to be able to be trading in the premises at the same time, operating two tills concurrently or one till with each logging in and out each transaction”, the committee judged.

If officers have to investigate future licensing issues at the shop, evidence such as CCTV footage evidence and till receipts “would go a long way to resolving which premises licence was operating at the given time”.

Members said the committee was “conscious that it did not need to determine any aspect of the business dispute between the parties”.

“It seemed sufficiently clear that civil litigation would be pursued between the parties and that any prejudice between the parties would be judged in those proceedings,” they added.

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