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

MWT

JohnPo said:

My prediction is that whoever takes on the administration of Tomato will find there are no funds - they will very quickly issue any outstanding bills without paying much attention as to their accuracy so their own fees get covered and then swiftly move to sell the 'debt book' for pennies in the pound and let debt collectors harass ex tomato customer for years to come - so be warned!

Unless there is a clear route to getting paid they will have problems finding anyone to take on the Administration and would be forced straight to liquidation with the consequences that can hold for the directors...

This may be one where the directors will decide to pay for the administration out of their own pockets to avoid the liquidation process...

JohnPo

MWT said:

JohnPo said:

My prediction is that whoever takes on the administration of Tomato will find there are no funds - they will very quickly issue any outstanding bills without paying much attention as to their accuracy so their own fees get covered and then swiftly move to sell the 'debt book' for pennies in the pound and let debt collectors harass ex tomato customer for years to come - so be warned!

Unless there is a clear route to getting paid they will have problems finding anyone to take on the Administration and would be forced straight to liquidation with the consequences that can hold for the directors...

This may be one where the directors will decide to pay for the administration out of their own pockets to avoid the liquidation process...

I received a bill on the 5th November covering October - so there will be lots of bills that will be collected by Direct Debit or contractually due to be paid in the next few days - and as they are not paying suppliers then there will probably will be sufficient cash at hand to fund the appointment of administrators I would have thought.

masonic

JohnPo said:

MWT said:

JohnPo said:

My prediction is that whoever takes on the administration of Tomato will find there are no funds - they will very quickly issue any outstanding bills without paying much attention as to their accuracy so their own fees get covered and then swiftly move to sell the 'debt book' for pennies in the pound and let debt collectors harass ex tomato customer for years to come - so be warned!

Unless there is a clear route to getting paid they will have problems finding anyone to take on the Administration and would be forced straight to liquidation with the consequences that can hold for the directors...

This may be one where the directors will decide to pay for the administration out of their own pockets to avoid the liquidation process...

I received a bill on the 5th November covering October - so there will be lots of bills that will be collected by Direct Debit or contractually due to be paid in the next few days - and as they are not paying suppliers then there will probably will be sufficient cash at hand to fund the appointment of administrators I would have thought.

That assumes the money credited won't be set off against borrowings from the bank in question. I see Barclays bank has two charges registered on CH. Their payment bank account sort code provided on bills is also for Barclays bank.

Qyburn

Insolvency practioner fees are ranked before a floating charge (typically bank).

Qyburn

Bendo said:

Tomatos tariffs were not complicated (other than the Agile like one that absolutely noone will have been on as they never published upcoming rates etc.  

Given that in the past 13 months, they never changed the rates there was only a handful of tariffs and the regional variations, it wouldn't be a huge effort to set them, pull the historical data and produce an accurate bill.

We'll probably have to just disagree on that, but just out of interest how would you do it? Manually per customer with Excel pivot table or similar.  Or by writing special software for this one off task. If the latter then bear in mind the level of QC and testing needed for software that will directly generate customer bills.

And bear in mind as previously commented, there's absolutely zero benefit to whoever did this or indeed to an administrator or liquidator. Octopus would get nothing from any bills prior to the takeover. An admistrator isn't likely to pay Octopus to carry out a pile of work with the aim of reducing the debt that he can call in.

masonic

Qyburn said:

Insolvency practioner fees are ranked before a floating charge (typically bank).

I was referring to the potential for set-off, not use of a floating charge. The bank would simply use the incoming money to reduce the debt of the insolvent, so it wouldn't be available to the administrators. The charges were merely mentioned to highlight that money was borrowed.

MWT

masonic said:

Qyburn said:

Insolvency practioner fees are ranked before a floating charge (typically bank).

I was referring to the potential for set-off, not use of a floating charge. The bank would simply use the incoming money to reduce the debt of the insolvent, so it wouldn't be available to the administrators. The charges were merely mentioned to highlight that money was borrowed.

Exactly, this one may turn out to be interesting unfortunately.

I don't see how they can get a further extension on the 'Intention...' given they have declared they have ceased trading, so I guess we'll see if they have managed to obtain administrators at some point next week...

GSV3MIAC2

There is also a new case file opened against tomato  by ofgem, presumably relating to pulling their license.

https://caseboard.io/cases/db022c8d-cbfc-44e7-a3b2-2008bc521b8a

Alex_ST

Alex_ST said:

Mywatts went offline for me too on Sept 4 0:30 and hasn’t come back at all. Bright went offline 6th Sept. Who can I contact to troubleshoot this? Is there a central authority for the comms side? Doubt Tomato will be much help. Concerned they might intentionally not be collecting TOU data to bill at higher rate. 

Unfortunately, I was correct to be suspicious of this “failure”. Tomato fabricated HH data within their system for the missing period (most of Sept, October). They reversed my pattern of consumption from mostly off-peak to mostly peak which meant their calculated bills are massively artificially inflated. I obviously lodged a complaint but they denied everything. They also blocked access to the company who own the Bright app to try to prevent the discrepancy being detected. 

I disputed the bill and haven’t paid. 

I have downloaded all the data from mywatts and where they have fabricated readings it’s very obvious because (aside from the sudden shift in usage pattern) the precision of the data exceeds that supplied by the meter (9 decimal places vs 3 from actual meter readings). 

Question: is it possible that they have pushed this data back to the meter so the corruption is irreversible? If not, how do I go about accessing the real data? DCC have been useless. (What exactly is the point of having a central authority for smart meter data if this sort of thing is allowed to happen?)

Has anyone else who experienced the outage at the start of Sept had a similar problem? 

Is Senapt (who own the mywatts app & are presumably liable) still trading? 

Given this practice, please be aware that downloading “your” data from mywatts is no guarantee that you will be billed accurately. 

QrizB

Alex_ST said:

Question: is it possible that they have pushed this data back to the meter so the corruption is irreversible?

No, your supplier cannot change the 13 rolling months of consumption data that's stored in your meter / comms hub.

Alex_ST said:

If not, how do I go about accessing the real data?

Your new supplier can pull it from your meter.