Damned by Ofgem, now raided by police
J.M. writes: My wife and I bought a guest house in Devon. The day after we moved in, my wife received cold calls about supplying gas and electricity. She was dealing with guests on her own and asked the caller to ring back. But he bombarded her with warnings that if she did not make a contract with a new supplier immediately, we would be put on an emergency tariff at extortionate rates.
As a result of this bullying, my wife agreed to what she thought was a five-year, fixed-price contract for gas and electricity with supplier BES of Fleetwood, Lancashire. We soon found the price was not fixed, but BES said it was not responsible for the sales pitch. It wanted £5,023 to release us from the contract, and refused to identify the firm that made the sales call.
The call came from someone using the business name UK Energy, but BES said it acquired us as customers through a company called Commercial Power Limited. We are now free of BES, but this has taken almost a year, and the stress has been immense. NOTHING in what you say comes as a surprise. While I was in contact with BES and its boss, Andrew Pilley, regulator Ofgem was carrying out its own investigation into the group. This ended with the damning verdict that BES failed to explain important contract terms properly, failed to handle complaints adequately and then wrongly blocked customers from switching to a different supplier.
Ofgem described BES’s misconduct as ‘unacceptable’ and hit it with penalties totalling £980,000, including £310,000 to be returned to customers. But the company’s problems do not seem to be over. Two weeks ago, its headquarters at Fleetwood Town Football Club’s stadium were raided by police and Trading Standards officers.
Pilley is chairman of the club, which is not itself under investigation. A spokesperson for National Trading Standards said: ‘Warrants have been executed at various properties in Lancashire as part of an investigation regarding the mis-selling of energy contracts to business customers.’
Pilley has hit back, saying no one has been arrested or charged. He accused Trading Standards officers of conducting ‘a very draconian search designed to have the most disruptive effect on the business’.
This is not his first clash with consumer protection officials. Last year, BES hired top law firm Field Fisher to threaten a Trading Standards investigator with legal proceedings over an email in which he referred to the ‘covert’ enquiries that have now led to the police raid. Telling an unhappy client to make a fuss amounted to the criminal offence of harassment, it claimed.
A different law firm acting for BES threatened you and your wife with a libel action over messages it said you had posted on a consumer website after managing to get the five-year contract cut to one year at a lower price. But just who caught you in the BES net in the first place? A number of firms have names similar to UK Energy, but they are not involved. The call your wife received supposedly came from an office at a business park in Blackpool, where BES has sponsored the illuminations.
Enquiries there drew a blank until the owners told me they had let the next door address to an energy firm. BES confirmed the details, saying that UK Energy was just a trading name used by Commercial Energy Limited, which it described as ‘an independent brokerage company’.
But just how independent was it? Its sole director gave his name in company records as Lee Qualter, born May 7, 1970. So how about this for a coincidence – Pilley used to be a director of a local company called Cash Machine Solutions, where his fellow director gave his name as Lee Goulding, born May 7, 1970.
Qualter confirmed to me that he and Goulding are the same person. He was born Qualter, switched to Goulding, and later reverted to Qualter, all for family reasons. He added: ‘Mr Pilley and I have known each other for many years. It is fair to say that we are close friends, but this does not mean to say that we are business partners.’ He rejected any claim of bullying.
Commercial Energy Limited has now been dissolved. As for its sales pitch, I have heard a recording of the call to your wife and it is so rushed as to be barely intelligible.
Yet another law firm acting for BES told me it would be ‘false and defamatory’ to publish your claim that any agent of BES bullied your wife. But reassuringly, it also insists that such sales calls come from ‘third party intermediaries’ who are not BES’s agents after all.
In short, complete outsiders used a trading name without revealing their true identity as Commercial Energy. Your wife was talked into a contract, and the details were passed to a separate company, Commercial Power, which finalised the deal with BES, leaving BES to benefit from the deal while taking no responsibility for it. No wonder there is a fresh investigation.