A West End actress has become embroiled in a bitter dispute with a disgraced former president of a city's estate agents' association.

Avril Gaynor has claimed she and her fellow freeholders of flats in a regency block in Brunswick Square, Hove, have been left "high and dry" by property manager Mark Packwood and his firm Packwood Property Services Ltd.

She said the company had failed to pay them legal costs of £6,369 as ordered by Brighton County Court in June 2007.

She said: "We've all been left seriously out of pocket. The court ordered him to pay but he's got out of it and left us high and dry."

The freeholders appointed PPS to manage the maintenance of their building in 1993 but decided in June 2003 that they wanted to end the arrangement.

They served six months notice and believed their involvement with the firm had been finished.

But in 2004 they received documents informing them that PPS was pursuing a court action against them for alleged unpaid fees of £4,500, which they disputed.

Over the next three years the case was brought before Brighton County Court on several occasions and on a number Mr Packwood failed to appear.

He told The Argus he had decided not to contest the case when the freeholders appointed lawyers DMH Stallard to argue their side.

He said: "We decided it was uneconomic to pursue the claim."

In June 2007 a judge threw out the claim and ordered PPS to pay the legal costs of Alencon Flat Management Ltd., the group set up by the freeholders.

When the payment was not made bailiffs were sent to PPS's offices only to be told that the firm no longer had any assets to pay the costs.

Mr Packwood said he had ceased to trade using PPS in 2004, although the company was still in existence, and had set up a new firm with different partners, called Packwood Property Services and Management Ltd.

He told The Argus yesterday: "We managed the building up until 2004 and we were left with a debt of £4,500.

"As far as I'm concerned it is finished. I haven't spoken to them since 2004 when they disputed my accounts.

"I don't particularly feel I've done wrong. "

Mr Packwood was involved in a similar dispute in 2004. Flat owner Stephanie Hike claimed she and the fellow residents of two apartment blocks in Palmeira Avenue, Hove, were owed £3,310.49 by PPS.

He refused to pay because he said he was owed £3,489.78 by residents of another block in Walsingham Road, who included Mrs Hike.

Mr Packwood set up PPS in Hove Street in 1991.

He was appointed president of the Brighton and Hove Estate Agent's Association in 2003 but was forced to resign after five months when he was found to have breached Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors rules.

His offence related to having accounts which landlords' money were paid directly into, separate from the main account of PPS.

Ms Gaynor played the part of the pharoah's wife Mrs Potiphar in a production of Joseph And His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at London's Albery Theatre. She has appeared in comedian Harry Hill's television show and was in the Sixties film On The Buses.