Tomato Energy (Electric Only Supplier) - Too Good To Be True ?

QrizB

wrf12345 said:

You need clever accountants to do a forensic audit of some of the big companies but alas the good ones are already working for the energy companies.

Are you one of these "clever accountants" yourself? Or arr you just spreading unfounded theories?

born_again

wrf12345 said:

The metering software failure totally undermined any chance they might have of being a low overhead company with competitive TOU tariffs - which raises the interesting question of how much it costs to buy/lease that software, presumably from a company that is not regulated by Ofgem and can be located in a low tax or zero tax jurisdiction with possible kickbacks to the directors (not Tomato as they have their own "software") who struggle with mere six figure salaries in Ofgem regulated companies? Same offshoring of profits with third world call centres (again, not Tomato), I suspect.

Even before Ofgem stopped them taking on new customers, I suspect forums like this one warned off many would-be customers.

Did Tomato not pay £5 million earlier this year to the software company ( Senapt Ltd) who own 75% of Tomato shares.
Who have same address & same directors.
So one thing is sure, if/when the rug is pulled. The directors will come out smelling of roses, while staff & creditors come out in the 💩 & the rest of us end up picking up the tab for the failure.

MWT

born_again said:

wrf12345 said:

The metering software failure totally undermined any chance they might have of being a low overhead company with competitive TOU tariffs - which raises the interesting question of how much it costs to buy/lease that software, presumably from a company that is not regulated by Ofgem and can be located in a low tax or zero tax jurisdiction with possible kickbacks to the directors (not Tomato as they have their own "software") who struggle with mere six figure salaries in Ofgem regulated companies? Same offshoring of profits with third world call centres (again, not Tomato), I suspect.

Even before Ofgem stopped them taking on new customers, I suspect forums like this one warned off many would-be customers.

Did Tomato not pay £5 million earlier this year to the software company ( Senapt Ltd) who own 75% of Tomato shares.
Who have same address & same directors.
So one thing is sure, if/when the rug is pulled. The directors will come out smelling of roses, while staff & creditors come out in the 💩 & the rest of us end up picking up the tab for the failure.

If you scroll up a few posts you'll see that Tomato is a 100% owned subsidiary of Senapt and the most recent published accounts for either Senapt group or Tomato are from almost 2 years ago (Dec '23) so nothing much is in the public domain about recent inter-company payments. 

born_again

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/132639/pdf/

Love the last paragraph

Tomato Energy is pioneering the energy transition with its revolutionary energy management platform powered by Senapt’s technology. This cloud-based, customer-centric innovation is transforming how energy is supplied, consumed and optimised.

JohnPo

Can someone give an intuitive guess as to when the failure of Tomato Energy will be formally announced and the likely timescale on the SOLR process kicking in?  Working out whether to initiate a switch away this weekend or leave it a few more days? 

masonic

JohnPo said:

Can someone give an intuitive guess as to when the failure of Tomato Energy will be formally announced and the likely timescale on the SOLR process kicking in?  Working out whether to initiate a switch away this weekend or leave it a few more days? 

As mentioned upthread the notice of intention to appoint an administrator is a last attempt to buy some time. If you initiated a switch now, very likely it would complete before a SOLR was appointed.

MWT

JohnPo said:

Can someone give an intuitive guess as to when the failure of Tomato Energy will be formally announced and the likely timescale on the SOLR process kicking in?  Working out whether to initiate a switch away this weekend or leave it a few more days? 

The one person who could give you a straight answer is still deep in denial right now, but it could be any day next week, or longer if he can persuade the court to grant an extension (unlikely), or if none of their creditors decide to force the issue.

You can also roll the dice on just waiting it out and then try to jump as soon as the announcement is made, which is risky but can work.

Personally, I'd say if your billing is working and you are up to date then there is little risk in waiting...

JohnPo

Thanks all up to date billing wise and meter reporting OK to MyWatts app.  I'll roll the dice for a couple more working days into next week and in mean time charge up the EV doing all my washing etc. knowing that once I switch I'll be on an SVT until the new supplier (actually my old one Octopus) confirms smart reads are active before moving to Octopus GO.

Qyburn

wrf12345 said:

"That's something like £250-300 per customer, which does seem a lot when you consider that even for a well-run energy business the average annual profit per customer is much less than £100." That is the whole point, energy retail profit is capped at three percent, moving money to unregulated (by Ofgem) companies mean they can keep within the cap whilst making lots of profit 

You misunderstand. Profits are not capped. Prices are capped to a level that means a properly run supplier should make 2 or 3% net profit. If a supplier is inefficient or hands out loads of cash to other companies, they can't just push their selling prices up above the cap to retain that percentage margin.

In any case the point about Tomato is that they aren't pushing their prices up.

Gobsh

Qyburn said: 

You misunderstand. Profits are not capped. Prices are capped to a level that means a properly run supplier should make 2 or 3% net profit. If a supplier is inefficient or hands out loads of cash to other companies, they can't just push their selling prices up above the cap to retain that percentage margin.

In any case the point about Tomato is that they aren't pushing their prices up.

And that's the thing about profits in "percentages". At the start of the Russia Ukraine war Russia ramped up the cost of gas to the UK, and Shell et all simply applied the same "margin" to those horrific prices and overnight were charging UK £Billions extra record profits, without spending a single penny extra, and Of gas did literally nothing! Any decent government would have intervened in the largest money grab in human history. This is literally Blood Money, profit energy companies would not have BUT for 1000s dying every day. And worse, we are STILL paying these a percentage of these inflated prices without a single extra penny being spent by energy companies.

Government should have allowed energy companies to pass on the increase applied by the Russians without adding a % profit margin to it