Two weeks of no power leaves residents in agony

It has been two weeks of living in darkness for the residents of a complex in Florida after being cut by City Power (CP) from owing close to R1.5 million in unpaid electricity bills.

Sectional Trust is a body corporate of estate agents which have four complexes in Florida that allegedly have not paid their electricity bills since May 2018, leaving their tenants and trustees angered by their mismanagement.

According to Lindsay Peters, one of the trustees of the complex, residents have been logging in complaints to the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) and their managing agent, Julie Randalls since 2018 about the very same problem.

“The first time I approached Julie about this issue, I felt as though it wasn’t escalated as a matter of importance. As trustees, we are supposed to receive our annual statements, but we have not received statements from Julie or the body corporate for over four years now. We have then since had continuous power cuts which is such an inconvenience for us because we remain consistent with our payments,” Peters said.

She told the Roodepoort Record that Sectional Trust has been using an old account which is identified as Indigo Sky, which was used by CP and CoJ stating that the account is still active and in use.

“We would get charged business rates instead of residential rates which did not make sense because why was this not attended to all this time? The body corporate has had ample time to resolve this issue but it seems like we keep getting different stories whenever we log in complaints,” Peters adds.

According to Randalls, she went to CoJ Thuso House Customer Service Centre in Johannesburg and spoke to the relevant people to assist her. She then confirmed that the account which was opened belonged to the developer and not the body corporate.

“I spoke to Ayanda from CoJ who referred me to someone in the treasury department, confirming that the account is still active and that they are aware of payments going into this account but not being allocated due to the payments not linking into the metro router system and that they are liaising with Absa to resolve it. A new account with Standard Bank will be opened so funds can be transferred there to make the payment to CP and that can’t happen if we do not get authorisation from the developer,” Randalls said.

The Record then spoke to CoJ’s director of communications and stakeholder engagement Stanley Maphologela, to give clarity and first confirmed that they are using Standard Bank which has been effective since June 2012.

“The body corporate ought to have approached the CoJ to open an electricity account in their name when the complex was completed in February 2017. Their first Acknowledgement of Debt (AOD) was entered on 22 May 2012. However, they opted to continue consuming services linked to the same account and entered into numerous AOD payment arrangements to settle the arrears on the said account without opening a new account in their name.

“The newly formed body corporate defaulted on all the payment arrangements with the CoJ and terminated the services supplied to the property due to non-payment of overdue account since the debt is linked to the premise,” Maphologela said.

Residents are currently still left with no answers. Their food has been damaged forcing them to live off takeaways and they have to use other alternatives to charge their devices for daily use.