This week’s podcast is short but not very sweet (despite it being our 200th). Sue is away in the UK, which allows me to vent about a couple of issues that have been bugging me.They are not particularly new – it’s just I’ve been irked by new examples.The first is based on a post to the Forum which details how a small-scale developer and his family have cynically and meticulously manipulated the votes in their strata scheme.Firstly they inflated their voting power to elect themselves as the committee, then avoided paying levies for the Unit Entitlements that they used to dominate the voting.Then they stacked the votes so that they have a veto over any big decisions the purchasers of their homes may want to make.Is it legal? Yes, mostly, but they tripped themselves up over one crucial detail.Then we have the issue of phoenixing and, more to the point, what the government isn’t doing about it.In my book of strata nastiness, phoenixing – where a developer walks away from their liabilities over defects, dissolves the company then starts another doing exactly the same thing – is fraud and the perps should be in jail.There’s no point expecting Building Commissioner David Chandler to come to the rescue. These are existing properties, not new builds and in any case, company law is Federal, not state business and ASIC clearly doesn’t care. They’d rather protect the “rights” of businesspeople to screw up and try again than our right to get what we paid for when we buy a home.Meanwhile, apologies for the late arrival of last week’s podcast (and thanks to Chris for the heads-up). Human error meant it was posted late.And getting back to last week’s references to our automatic transcription service getting things wrong, this week it has “pheonixing” as Phoenix Singh – I think I’ll make that my drag name.TRANSCRIPT IN FULLJimmy 00:00It's Sunday morning and here I am, all alone in our makeshift Flat Chat podcast studio (which is basically my desk, with the door closed). Sue Williams is not here; she's in London, as we mentioned last week. And that's a shame, because this is our 200th episode. Not only that; we are getting perilously close to having had 50,000 listens to the podcast, over the past couple of years, which is a big milestone for us, that's for sure.So this being Sunday, I have to apologise if what follows turns out to be a bit of a sermon. But there's a couple of stories that have caught my attention in the past week, which are all about doing the right thing and the people who do the wrong thing and get away with it. I'm talking about people who take control of their committees of their strata schemes, by pretty dodgy means.And I'm talking about phoenixing developers, who leave ordinary people with huge debts and defects in their buildings. That's a lot to talk about, so we'd better get on with it.I'm Jimmy Thomson, I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review, and this is the Flat Chat Wrap.[MUSIC]JimmyA couple of stories have come to my attention in the past week, both of which really bothered me. One of them is in the Flat Chat forum and that's about how a family, who are all connected to a developer, have managed to structure things so th
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Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.