Supplier has taken money from my account without notice

wolfy80 · 14 February 2013 at 12:27PM

Hi all, i'm hoping someone can offer some advice. I'm self employed and have a car lease contract. Due to extended delays on their part, we were forced to hire a van on daily hire basis for about 3 months, before our 'new' lease van was delivered. At that time, I told them that we'd been given a quote for daily hire with unlimited mileage from Enterprise. They said they could do us the same and so we went through them. As part of our extended lease contract, i'd also made it clear that the van would need minimum mileage allowance of 45k yearly.
We were hit with an invoice of just under £900 in January for excess mileage, out of hours charge and fuel charge. They had not included any dates for the charges; and NO MILEAGE figures either! They said the payment would be taken from our account on 12 January. I immediately disputed it as, firstly was under the impression we had unlimited mileage, secondly no out of hours service was given, thirdly, the fuel tank was full on return of the hire van and finally, did not think that the invoice was legally valid as it contained no explanation as to how they had reached the sum of £900. They put it on hold and said they'd be in touch. I checked our account on Monday this week; and they had used our DD mandate (thats set up for the regular lease payments) to take out the disputed £900. When I contacted them to say invoice was still in dispute and that we'd received no notice or correspondance from then to say that this was going to happen. They eventually admitted that they'd emailed us on 5 Feb, but had sent it to an incorrect email address, so we'd never received it. We have asked for a full return of the money until the dispute is fully resolved, but they're refusing. As i'm self employed, this is a large amount of money to go without; particularly when our VAT is due for payment at the end of Feb. Any advice you are able to offer will be greatly appreciated as I currently feel like this massive company (Leaseplan) are bullying me!!

Wywth · 14 February 2013 at 1:22PM

wolfy80 wrote: »

Hi all, i'm hoping someone can offer some advice. I'm self employed and have a car lease contract. Due to extended delays on their part, we were forced to hire a van on daily hire basis for about 3 months, before our 'new' lease van was delivered. At that time, I told them that we'd been given a quote for daily hire with unlimited mileage from Enterprise. They said they could do us the same and so we went through them. As part of our extended lease contract, i'd also made it clear that the van would need minimum mileage allowance of 45k yearly.
We were hit with an invoice of just under £900 in January for excess mileage, out of hours charge and fuel charge. They had not included any dates for the charges; and NO MILEAGE figures either! They said the payment would be taken from our account on 12 January. I immediately disputed it as, firstly was under the impression we had unlimited mileage, secondly no out of hours service was given, thirdly, the fuel tank was full on return of the hire van and finally, did not think that the invoice was legally valid as it contained no explanation as to how they had reached the sum of £900. They put it on hold and said they'd be in touch. I checked our account on Monday this week; and they had used our DD mandate (thats set up for the regular lease payments) to take out the disputed £900. When I contacted them to say invoice was still in dispute and that we'd received no notice or correspondance from then to say that this was going to happen. They eventually admitted that they'd emailed us on 5 Feb, but had sent it to an incorrect email address, so we'd never received it. We have asked for a full return of the money until the dispute is fully resolved, but they're refusing. As i'm self employed, this is a large amount of money to go without; particularly when our VAT is due for payment at the end of Feb. Any advice you are able to offer will be greatly appreciated as I currently feel like this massive company (Leaseplan) are bullying me!!

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