What is a development Expense File?
Put simply, it is a comprehensive record of all that happens at your development, and shows how your service charges have been spent.
Remember, it is not a record of Peverel/Firstport expenditure, it is a record of how Peverel/Firstport have spent your money, not theirs!
Whilst it can be that the odd mistake may occur, too many mistakes have been uncovered to put mistakes down to an administrative error.
Indeed information has been passed to About Peverel which suggests that should a Firstport member of staff find an error which would lead to residents receiving a refund to their service charge account, they are being encouraged not to say anything to the residents and only act if the residents spot the error.
The development expense files are a record of all work undertaken, all services provided all payments for such.
Any payment charged to residents service charge accounts that cannot be supported by a supporting invoice is invalid and legally has to be refunded.
Where development expense files have been examined, it has been found on a regular basis that charges have been levied for work or services carried out at an entirely different development.
It should be noted, that a leaseholder can only be held responsible for what is a condition of the lease. That does not include paying to maintain a different development!
Other cases have revealed that where their are service charge debtors, Firstport have used reserve funds to cover the debts, particularly when a RTM has been carried out.
The expense files have several headings to identify the items charged for. These are not readily identifiable as they use code numbers, which have now been published by About Peverel. It has also been discovered the headings have changed over the years, thus allowing Firstport to attempt to hide payments that are either not chargeable under the lease or have been double charged as part of the management fee and then as a seperate item.
Regular contributor, Chas, has done a superb job in highlighting some of the tactics employed by Firstport to disguise payments.
Similar tactics are sure to be used on nearly everyone of the Firstport managed developments.
It is understood, that often (unlike the price fixing scandal) amounts may not seem great. This is in the hope that residents won't bother too much if the amounts of money they are being cheated out of.
But to a company that is forced to pay it's "owner" interest rates of betwen 9% and 15% and is being forced by RBS to reduce their loan facility by 1m pounds each and every 6 months, any which way they can find to liberate resident service charge to pay down their debts will do.
Fundamentally, the economics of the situation are that without scams, without kickbacks (sorry bulk purchase rebate agreements), without inventing work, without selling off house manager's flats, without inventing admin charges, Firstport could not function.
