Where’s my borehole?

May you kindly help me by contacting a company.

We paid them a sum exceeding P100,000 for drilling a borehole at our field in November 2019. They came to do the work in February 2020 and for 3 weeks they were still at our place and could not do anything right. They were not able to give us a finished product i.e. a borehole with water due to the fact that they left the rods in the well and all those things. In a nutshell, we didn’t get value for our money. So they agreed to come and drill another borehole for us.

Richard, little did we know that 2 years down the line we would still be without a borehole and still chasing a company with all the resources but do not want to fulfil their promise. To cut the long story short, the 2 Directors always take us from pillar to post and as of Friday 26th Februar, 2021 they are not picking up our calls. A director promised that they will come to our place very soon and, on probing him as to when exactly, he did not want to commit.

Now from 1st March, he is not answering our calls, for why? Only he knows. So please can you intervene and tell them that we are losing our patience and we are forced to ask for a refund if they are unable to come to our field/place this weekend?

I think the time has come to get angry. You paid this company an enormous amount of money to do a job for you that they have failed to do.

Section 14 (1) of the Consumer Protection Regulations says that when “a supplier undertakes to perform any services for or on behalf of a consumer, the consumer has a right to … timely performance and completion of those services (and) timely notice of any unavoidable delay”. It also says that consumers can expect “performance of the services in a manner and quality that consumers are reasonably entitled to expect”. Cleary this company has failed all of those tests and needs to face up to their obligations.

And what are those obligations? The Act goes further. It says that when a supplier “fails to perform a service to the standards” they are required to “remedy any defect in the quality of the services” or to “refund the consumer a reasonable portion of the price paid for the services performed and goods supplied, having regard to the extent of the failure”.

So let’s do our best to educate this supplier on their obligations to you under the Consumer Protection Act and, perhaps more importantly, because of their moral obligation to offer decent customer service.

Update. Despite giving me blue ticks on Whatsapp, they have chosen not to respond to any of my messages and they’re giving me the same treatment they gave you. I think we can assume they don’t give a damn about their customers. Do they care about their reputation because if they’re not careful they might not have one for much longer.