I have a bit of a story. I'll try and keep it short but it's relatively long, really. This all occurred between a few years before I was born up to around the time I was born.
My parents used to run an "ironing service" - my dad would go out in his van, collect people's (clean) clothes and take them back to our house. My mum would then iron them, and my dad would take them back to people on hangers on the rails in the back of the van! (This sounds like it's really enforcing typical gender roles, but my mum actually couldn't drive at the time so it's the only way it could work!) Anyway, as time went on, their business got more and more popular. My dad ended up going on "the rounds" three or four times a day to collect and drop off clothing, and my mum was soon joined by other people ironing - it was a decent operation because the costs were so low, just labour really; The women - and it was always women - who did the ironing could do so in their own home (so ideal if they had young kids) and all they needed was an iron. The only other cost was the van - a battered old Ford Transit van. I spent yeaaaaars in that van.
Anyway, the business kept expanding and they were doing well, so they ended up buying a laundrette. They ran this as a typical laundrette but it also allowed them to offer a more fancy service to the ironing customers, because now they could clean and iron the clothes. Over time they ended up buying another laundrette, and then a third. Things were going well! They employed people in the laundrette to clean up and make sure everyone was doing all OK, and one of those women ended up living in the flat above the Laundrette (which was part of the business - so effectively my parents were their landlords).
Everything was going well until, a few years after working there, the aforementioned cleaner decided that it was time to move on and so she moved out of the flat and left the job, on entirely amicable terms with my parents. However, the guy who had been her boyfriend, living there with her, stayed. As in, he refused to leave. Obviously my parents tried to get him evicted as he was taking up the space and refusing to pay the rent - but they struggled, because there are (were? I'm not sure what the situation is now) laws that protect squatting rights under certain circumstances (if it's not the owners primary home, if they've lived there without being kicked out for a certain period of time etc - all these criteria that were met for this situation).
Needless to say, my parents lawyered up to get him evicted and he was taken to court. This guy didn't have a job so he had hardly any money, so his legal representation was provided by - or, rather, paid for - by the government. His legal team's tactics were effectively to drag the case out for long enough in the hopes that the mounting legal fees and loss of revenue from the lack of rental income (whilst they still had to pay the mortgage, obviously) would cause my parents to just pay him off to leave. They were slightly more principled than this, and combined with their legal team telling them to keep it up with the case, they stuck to their guns.
I guess this is the twistish bit. In the end, they had to actually sell a laundrette in order to keep paying the legal fees and the mortgage on this other property with no income. Then they had to sell another. They couldn't sell the laundrette in question because of the case. In the end my parents basically lost the entire business, all because of this parasitical court case just bled them dry. In the end they simply couldn't pay the legal fees anymore and they had to throw in the towel on the case - which then meant they actually had to pay the squatter's legal fees because technically he'd won the case, adding insult in injury. Because it wasn't a limited liability company, my parents basically defaulted on their mortgage on our actual house so we ended up briefly homeless (around the time I was born). As a final added insult, they had to get rid of all the staff doing the ironing as they were an unaffordable expense but because they didn't do it in the proper manner, they got collared with unfair dismissal and had to pay one of the previous staff members a bunch of money (I don't know how much).
They continued to run the ironing service as it started - just them two - from our now rented house, for a while. One night my dad actually saw this guy - the squatter - walking across the road whilst he was filling in his little ledger book having just made a pickup or whatever. He said that he genuinely sat there, staring, thinking about whether he should just run the guy over - I mean, he'd basically ruined his life's work at that point. The only reason he didn't was because my brother was about 2.5 and I was about to be born. My parents split up some 12 years later and my dad never owned a house again for about 18 years after these events.
