These stories would make very tedious reading if I were to go into too much detail (they may well be tedious anyway), but each is genuinely shocking and each company was clearly engaged in fraudulent behaviour. I am a very stubborn individual and I do not back down easily. Also, although I say so myself, my mind works in a way that might have served me well in the legal profession and I do write a good letter. I have successfully taken on insurance companies and banks and even stood up to attempted and fraudulent intimidation from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. This last took the form of two telephone calls from the VAT office aggressively asking why I had not responded to messages left with staff and announcing that a VAT inspection was going to take place. I had nothing to hide whatsoever and so simply asked how far back they wanted to go and where they would like the inspection to be carried out (we had had one such before and it was in fact pretty painless, involving a guy going through invoices at one of the desks in our shop for a day and asking me what a manuscript was, twice). I then asked the two people who were working for me at the time why they had not delivered these rather important messages. Both swore blind they had not taken them. When the VAT office rang again, I explained that whilst we were entirely ready for any inspection, they had created serious trust issues with my staff. Either they were lying or the VAT guy was. There was a long silence, and then: “Mr Rota, there will be no need for an inspection at this time.” I later learned that this was a standard tactic – intimidate and make a judgement according to how people reacted. I had neither panicked nor blustered and so that was the end of it. The dishonesty of this ruse still rankles.
Another tactic which runs through these tales is that of wearing people down. I can easily imagine some poor pensioner, perhaps living alone and perhaps without the wherewithal to resist, simply giving in to relentless menacing.
It is important to remember when dealing with insurance companies that they employ people, presumably on a commission basis, to ensure that as little is paid out on claims as possible or, better still, nothing at all. I have dealt with various loss adjusters who always begin when they visit with, “Rest assured, although you may think we are here to minimise how much we pay you, we are in fact here to negotiate the fairest settlement for both parties”, by which they mean, “We are here to minimise how much we pay out.”
I should say that our business insurance broker is a lovely man and that he has fought hard on our behalf on more than one occasion. This was our household insurance however and it was a very different story. There was, as is often the case, a long chain of companies between our broker, the people we thought we were insured with, and who we were actually insured with. All roads led to Aviva. We had come home from holiday to find our wooden kitchen floor not just spongy but almost floating. This was due to a pinhole leak in an underfloor pipe. We happily paid for the actual repair and put in a claim for a new floor, replastering and the repair of other damage caused by the leak. There followed a succession of visits by various spivvy types who promised us the earth, specifically that they would appoint the required tradesmen and that we would be accommodated in a local, not inexpensive hotel whilst the work went on. None of that ever transpired. What I really did not want was to have to source the plumbers, plasterers, carpenters and so on myself, mostly on the basis that good ones tend to be in rather short supply where we live. Having agreed to these terms, Aviva then announced they would only go ahead if we first fixed a £29,000 damp problem in the property. Clearly they did not want the responsibility or to be liable for the repairs. I asked to see the quotation they claimed to have. They refused on the grounds of “commercial confidentiality”. They sent out another property inspector who left muttering that he was sick of being asked to provide false reports for Aviva, which they said they found “disappointing”. They offered under £6,000 which would not have begun to cover the work required. I declined it and outlined actual expected costs. All the while (and this went on for almost a year and a half) we had a gaping hole in the kitchen floor which was dangerous for the family which included three young children. At one point I covered it with a piece of wood which one of Aviva’s representatives contemptuously tossed out – we never saw it again.
Then things began to get rather sinister. I received what I can only describe as a threatening phone call from someone at Aviva who was clearly employed as a kind of hard man enforcer, but I would not be bowed. Our last visitor sat down with us to discuss everything. It kept coming back to the £29,000 quote they claimed to have in their possession. I asked if he had it with him. Yes, he did. Could I see it then? He fished around in his briefcase and produced a document which was barely even relevant and did not mention any specific sum of money at all. I had to go outside to calm down in the fresh air. “It doesn’t exist, does it, it doesn’t even exist?” I shouted. He looked shamefaced and quickly left.
Here comes the moment of victory. There were many Aviva employees involved, I stated in writing, who were very clearly involved in a conspiracy to commit fraud. The use of those words quickly produced a fulsome apology and a cheque for some £13,000 which included almost £1,000 in compensation for the way in which we had been treated. The moral of the story? Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
The Royal Bank of Scotland story, the scandals, fraud and taxpayer bailout are of course well known. We were specifically a classic example of what they tried to do to small businesses. We had a substantial, long-standing business overdraft, a five-figure sum, which naturally attracted standard interest payments. What RBS did, without ever telling us, was transfer the overdraft to a loan, on which punitive charges arose. I refused to pay. It was a while before anything much happened, until I received a summons to an address in the City of London to discuss the matter. The debt collectors were astonished to see me, even more surprised that we were still in business and appalled when they learned what had happened, although I am convinced this was far from the first time they had come across it. We agreed that we would pay 60% of the amount owing and the rest was written off. It was a great result for us.
The now notorious scam (and that was what it was) was to attack small businesses, make repayments unaffordable and then strip their assets – what they were after was the property we owned. There were the beginnings of a class action some time later, to which I eagerly signed us up, but nothing ever came of it. The chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority stated: “”It is important to recognise that the business of GRG (RBS’s Global Restructuring Group) was largely unregulated and the FCA’s powers to take action in such circumstances, even where the mistreatment of customers has been identified and accepted, are very limited. Taking action was therefore always going to be difficult and challenging.” Which makes one wonder what the point of that toothless organisation is. A leaked report later revealed the involvement of a Treasury agency. It was described by members of parliament as the worst scandal since the financial crash, but as is so often the way, ultimately it was covered up. Many businesses were driven to bankruptcy and there were similarities in many cases with the sufferings of the victims of the recently exposed Post Office scandal. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
I didn’t win this one although in a sense I didn’t lose it either. I would certainly have been better off simply paying them money which I didn’t owe them, which amounted to around £500. But why should I have done? The documentation on this one was inches thick. To cut a very long story short – this went on for years, well over a decade – we repeatedly attempted to terminate our business contract following a query I had made about one disproportionately high gas bill we had been sent. It was evident that they were utterly impossible to deal with and rarely bothered to reply to correspondence. After endless e-mails, letters and phone calls, we mutually agreed to a zero rate contract – I paid half the sum they claim we owed, we would never hear from them again. I had that in writing, from them. That was my main aim, not to have to deal with them any more, ever. I have said in earlier Wildpilot posts that generally I have no beef with those at the coalface (as it were), but this one went from the bottom right to the very top. British Gas had sent bills to our home address for a business property we had vacated many years previously, on the basis that there had been a change to our “variable rate contract”. We didn’t have a variable rate contract and so if I opened the envelopes at all, I assumed there were either errors or just the usual junk mail. I refused to pay and was subjected to a constant stream of threatening correspondence and phone calls, sometimes several times a week, for months. Eventually I engaged a solicitor. It was not actually a terribly complicated matter, but he was very good at making it seem so. He got absolutely nowhere but would spend an hour on the phone, without my authorisation, explaining the situation to yet another British Gas employee – then he would send me a bill for £1,000 or so. I was invoiced £11,000 by him in all (I never paid the last £1,000 and, rather suspiciously, he has never chased me for it) including engaging a barrister. For that a court date was set. British Gas simply didn’t turn up. I heard that even court officials were amazed at their audacity and I remain deeply shocked that an organisation can get away with that, simply presumably because of their size. Too big to sue.
I contacted my MP who got in touch with British Gas’s CEO, but she (the CEO) swallowed whole the succession of outright lies we had heard so very many times and refused to do anything. I literally lost count of the number of times I would deal with some new person at British Gas to be told, “I am so sorry to hear about this Mr Rota, I will be the one to resolve this once and for all for you,” but then would never hear from them again as, no doubt, they quickly dropped this hot potato.
I haven’t heard from this appalling outfit again which is some sort of a result but it is dreadful that they can behave like this with complete impunity, something for which they are absolutely notorious, at the terrible expense, not just in the financial sense but in time spent and extreme stress, of individuals and small businesses. I will admit that whenever I picked up the phone to them at one point I would as often as not finish the conversation either shaking with rage, heart pounding, or in tears, or both. Capitalism gone terribly wrong.
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