LEWISHAM COUNCIL AND MEZE MANGAL: NOTICE WITHDRAWN DISCOVERY

From extractor fan to existential fight

How Lewisham Council’s prosecution of Meze Mangal spiralled from a planning notice into a multimillion-pound Proceeds of Crime case — and how our discovery of one forgotten court document may change everything for the Gök brothers.
The Big Retort…

In chess, a pawn captures by moving diagonally one square into the space the enemy piece once held. In this analogy, Lewisham Council is the queen: powerful, overreaching, convinced of its own invincibility. We — the citizens, the pawns — advance carefully, one square at a time, playing by the rules. But when the board is blocked and process bends, there remains one move the powerful in their Catford tower never anticipate: The quiet capture. 

We recently reported the Meze Mangal case — following two Turkish brothers, Ahmet and Sahin, hard-working British citizens, whose passports have been seized. Persecuted by officialdom and juggling day-to-day restaurant life under a white-hot media glare, the phone at Meze now rings off the hook with bookings… from journalists.

While cameras flash on the faces of Ahmet and Şahin Gök, we in Room 300 have kept digging — quietly, methodically. What we found made us exhale — long and hard.

How did we get here?

It begins, absurdly enough, with a fan — an extractor fan.

Installed at Meze Mangal to disperse cooking odours after a single complaint, it should have been a straightforward planning issue.

Instead, it became the opening move in an escalation that turned two restaurateurs into criminal defendants: passports seized, livelihoods frozen, reputations ground through the bureaucratic machinery of what some now call the Soviet state of Lewisham.

At every turn, the council appeared less interested in resolving a minor planning breach than in testing the outer limits of its enforcement powers.

What began as a question of ventilation became, over time, a test case in how far a local authority might stretch the Proceeds of Crime Act — POCA — a law written to catch gangsters, not grill chefs.

Then, long buried among the files of successive lawyers, we uncovered a document that had lain undiscovered — until now. A Notification of Withdrawn Offences, issued by Bromley Magistrates’ Court on 10 January 2020.

It helps explain why the Gök brothers reasonably believed the matter had been concluded — until Lewisham later revived enforcement and escalated it into confiscation proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

What follows is the paper trail that turned a withdrawn case into a criminal prosecution — a bureaucratic sleight of hand spanning years, a sequence of notices and letters, and one devastating misunderstanding. This is disturbing evidence of neglect and misinformation by council officers.

Extract from Bromley Magistrates’ Court “Notification of Withdrawn Offences”, dated 10 January 2020 — confirming four enforcement charges were withdrawn and that “no further action will be taken.”

That single court notice — never clarified, then forgotten, became the foundation of a misunderstanding with life-changing consequences for Ahmet and Şahin Gök. Pursued by a council machine apparently determined to test POCA on a planning dispute, they found themselves caught in a net meant for sharks — when they were, at most, small fry.

Whether this crucial document will find its way into open court remains to be seen.

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Legal note

The confiscation proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act remain before Woolwich Crown Court.
Nothing here comments on the merits of that ongoing case or seeks to influence its outcome.
The Notification of Withdrawn Offences is a historic court document that formally states four earlier charges were withdrawn and that “no further action will be taken.”
This evidence — photographed directly by The Big Retort — goes solely to questions of procedure, transparency, and accountability, not guilt or innocence in any pending matter.

THE BIG RETORT