A FAMILY kicked out of their home by their landlord while they were on holiday have seem him face justice.

Elissasvet Manazi and her two sons were visiting family in Greece when Simon Sarbon moved another tenant into the Phipps Road home they had shared for five years.

He changed the locks and dumped all their possessions in a damp shed, where many were ruined by mould.

Most of the family’s things were lost or destroyed during the eviction in September.

Mrs Manazi, 47, a hospital porter at the John Radcliffe Hospital, her 19-year-old daughter Evi and her 15-month-old baby, and Mrs Manazi’s sons Michail Raphael, 15, and Fatio Mario, 13, were left homeless.

Despite warnings from Oxford City Council, 40-year-old Sarbon, of Garsington Road, Oxford, refused to let them back in their home.

The council said he had previously complained to them about the family being in rent arrears.

On Monday the council successfully prosecuted him at Oxford Magistrates’ Court.

He pleaded guilty to displacing a residential occupier from their premises and was ordered to do 220 hours of unpaid work and pay the family £1,699 compensation.

Now the family is warning others about rogue landlords.

Mrs Manazi said: “I wasn’t smart enough to prevent all this disaster and to be honest, I have lost my hope about help.

“I want people to know how to protect themselves because I know many people in trouble don’t know how.”

Mrs Manazi is now staying with her daughter, who has a house in Oxford, and said she is regularly working up to 16 hours overtime to save up to rent her own house.

She said: “If I work any less people won’t give me the money to escape this hell.”

Mrs Manazi said she and her family moved to the UK from their home in Greece 11 years ago to escape racial persecution because her two boys are black.

They lived in London for six years but she said the crime rate was too high there. She moved to Oxford for a safer and more peaceful life in a small city famed for its education.

The city council has refused to help her find a new home because, as a foreign national, she has not been in work for long enough.

She added: “If it were just me, I would leave this country and go home but my children don’t want to hear about it. They don’t even have basic Greek.”

City councillor Ed Turner said: “This was an appalling and callous way for these tenants to have been treated and I am glad the landlord has received a substantial sentence. Tenants are people, not commodities to be shunted around at will.

“The council and authorities must be vigorous in clamping down on rogue landlords.”