Powercat 525 Evolution-Our Experience of Ownership

We have had enough of feeling as though our lives are being played with.  Now it gets official.  Our particulars of claim have been finalised and next week we will be serving court papers on Powercats Ltd of Redruth Cornwall.

We are fed up with feeling mucked around and hopefully once we get into the official structure of a court action things will start becoming a bit less murky and vague.

At least we will have a time frame within which we can expect this all to be over and done with.

Hopefully everyone will stick to deadlines which are set down by the court and so nobody can be faffed about with and have their time wasted any more.

It is a shame because we were prepared to do a deal at first.  But the whole point of that was to get it sorted out quickly and without being any further inconvenienced by this mess.  That point gets negated when the people offered the deal just seem to muck about with what feel like deliberate delaying tactics for undetermined reasons of their own.

On our side of things we feel much more secure and confident with the UK legal system cranked into action.  It has a definite timeline and we know where we are with it.

In the meantime our poor Powercat 525 Evolution sits unused in a controlled storage facility as it has done since the day it was hauled out of the water on the 15th April this year.  The storage facility has a book in which all the movements of the boats in its control are recorded and signed for, so that nobody can move a craft out of there without it being recorded.

The boat sits there unaltered since the incident.  We do not want it and didn't want it after the close call incident in the harbour and we certainly didn't want the incredibly (and I use that word in its literal sense) unpleasant and upsetting situation we subsequently experienced in trying to get Powercats to do the right thing by us.

But challenges are there to be overcome, and we have never shrunk from a challenge and this one is no exception.

This time of year is hazardous in Greece as in other hot countries.  Fire is easily started and not easily stopped.  The dry vegetation catches easily and it takes fast and decisive action to avoid disaster.

Luckily in lots of cases there is a fire engine, or helicopter or similar on hand to douse the flames before too much damage is done.

Today we were driving along a main road on the island when a car coming towards us started to wave at us.  It wasn't anyone we knew and he was flashing his lights as well.  We decided there must be some hazard on the road ahead and so we slowed down considerably.

As we continued quite a way on without any hazard materialising we wondered if we had read his actions properly.  But we still kept slower than usual and we were alert and looking out for anything out of the ordinary.

Because of this we spotted the fire ahead, with the tail of traffic and people trying to fight the main fire at the beginning of the traffic in good time to stop the car.  Just ahead of us was a secondary blaze that had broken out and there were cars actually waiting in the queue of traffic alongside the fire!!!

Although it was a bit dangerous to turn at that spot we decided it was less dangerous than staying parked next to a spreading fire with a risk of being trapped there.

We turned and on our way back home we tried to warn other cars coming towards us of the danger.

But most people appeared to ignore our warnings, and that was if they were even able to notice our flashing lights and waving arms as many were speeding along and ignoring not only us but everything around them.

We managed to stop a lorry and let him know of the danger, but a tourist car approaching just sped up and overtook the lorry while we were trying to wave and warn them too.  They stared pointedly ahead in that way that people do when you know they have seen you but they are deliberately avoiding eye contact.

It was so frustrating desperately trying to help, but being ignored.  I just hope they are all safe.  I keep remembering the descriptions of people being caught in fires on the mainland last year.  Now I understand how people could drive into danger.

I expect it will be OK - but it is a scary thing to witness first hand.

As I said yesterday, here are the questions we asked Cornwall County Council under the Freedom Of Information Act.

1. Have Powercats been given any actions/remedies to undertake as a result of any Trading Standards visit and if so what actions/remedies were requested of them?

2. Have Powercats ever been the subject of a consumer complaint/s before and if so what was/were the nature of the complaint/s and what was/were the product/s involved?

3. Were Trading Standards invited by Powercats to visit and check their factory, product and procedures?

4. Did Trading Standards visit Powercats to check their factory, product and procedures last year and if so what prompted that visit?

5 Are Trading Standards able to confirm or deny that upon visiting Powercats in response to our recent complaint that Trading Standards are " happy with us (powercats) and our products"?

6. May we please have copies of correspondance and/or reports and a summary of the situation to date, regarding our current complaint against Powercats Ltd.

Since the last post - I temporarily removed this blog's posts.  My main reason was as follows:
I had just watched a film called Meet the Robinson's
- SPOILER ALERT - DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW A PLOT SPOILER

IN the film was a rather sad little boy who turned out to be the film baddie because he hadn't been treated kindly as a kid.  The hero went back in time and changed one action and the little boy then grew up to be a goodie.

END OF SPOILER

I enjoyed that film and it made me wonder whether Powercats Ltd were behaving so strangely because they were under too much pressure.  So I decided to take the blog down to give them some breathing space.  I know its a dizzy reason but sometimes feelgood movies get under my skin and it was worth a try.

But they contacted us with a letter which had changed the goal posts from the tentative proposal we had provisionally agreed to.

If you remember we made them an offer - they came back with Yes but can we have X Y and Z and we said provisionally yes.  Then they said can we have that in writing(after the deadline), so we put it in writing and then they responded (after the new deadline) arguing with the actual conditions they had asked us to add into the proposal!!!

Oh and get this now it was wrapped up with a threat of them taking us to court because of this blog!!!

So we gave them one last chance.  the dead line for that chance expired yesterday at 4.  They asked for more time - AGAIN - until 4pm today - guess what - no deal has been agreed.

The papers are now being finalised and we are going to court.

We have had our response from the Freedom of Information Request from Cornwall County Council regarding Powercats and Cornwall Trading Standards - and it has been very informative and helpful.

We are not allowed to publish the responses as it is part of the terms of them answering these questions that we do not do so.  However tomorrow I will publish the questions and anyone can ask the County Council the same questions via the FOI act and as long as you ask for the response via electronic methods then you shouldn't be charged anything.

But I want to make one thing very very clear.  The truth is important to me.  It is the one thing that I base my life on.  It is my bedrock.  It is what keeps my world in equilibrium.  Whatever else anyone can accuse me of, there is no-one on this planet who can state that I am a liar without themselves being guilty of what they accuse me.

There is no amount of money in the world that would compensate me to the extent that I would be prepared to change on that stance.

My honesty is not for sale. It is who I am and without it I would have nothing worth anything to me.

There are those who appear to think that I and my husband would be prepared to sign a document for money stating something that we do not believe.

To them I say  - think again. 

The last post only went online today although it had been written 6 days ago.  The offer expired last week but Powercats solicitor contacted us to ask for the offer to be repeated in writing to give them a bit longer to consider it.

So we paid our solicitor to write that letter, we paid him for the time he spent discussing it with their solicitor and we paid him for the time involved in discussing that with us.

They were given until Moday officially to respond and unofficially until yesterday. 

We heard nothing from them.

So we have yet again been forced to spend money because of us being led by the nose into believing that certain things were happening, only for us to be left dangling with no communication as things fizzle out.

We have reluctantly been forced to tell our solicitor to instruct our barrister to finish his draft particulars of claim in order to commence legal proceedings as soon as possible.

This is hardly what we expected when we fell for the quote on their website "Quite simply, the Powercat experience is one the whole family is bound to enjoy" - if we were masochists then I might agree with them on that.

OK - We asked for a refund for our boat initially.

After a very long time and an online challenge on a forum - we finally had some movement towards some progress.
Their lawyers contacted our lawyers and it was pretty obvious that they were not going to make any kind of offer other than to offer to fix the boat.

We weren't happy with that because it wasn't an offer to pay us money to get it fixed by someone we trusted. 
It was an offer for us to either move the boat back to the UK at our own expense for it to be fixed by them and then pay to move it back afterwards - which would have cost us around £5,000!!! 

Alternatively Mr Philpott was kindly offering to pop along to our home and fix the boat himself - again not a prospect we relished, given he had called us malicious by this time and gone online and told one or two little terminological inexactitudes.

So we came up with what we thought was a generous offer.

Given that we have every legal right to reject the boat as it has 'latent defects' as well as other problems. 

Given that going to court will cost each party at least £10,000, given that we have already spent over £5,000 on our own costs trying to get this thing sorted. 

Given that Powercats have made no offer of compensation other than the initial offer to repay the cost of the Bimini which has not been referred to since and of which we have not seen one penny and which cost about £1300.

We offered Powercats a £10,000 deal.

If they gave us £10,000 - we would stop proceedings against them.  We would go away.  They would never hear from us again. 

It would be in full and final settlement and would cover our legal costs and  other expenses, and leave us at that point around £4,000 - £5,000 to spend on getting our boat safe for use and CE compliant. 

It would absolve them from any further responsibility should anything else turn out to need doing in the future and release them from their guarantee obligations.

This offer was made following various comments made by various people on an online forum which suggested that maybe Powercats would not have the financial ability to be able to see a court case through and would neither be able to reimburse us at the end of it if they went bust.

We had no evidence that Powercats were in any sort of financial difficulty at that point, however we have only ever been trying to get our problems taken seriously and have always been open to sensible and reasonable suggestions for resolving this issue. 

We do not wish ever to have any personal ongoing contact with Powercats ever again and that is why we wanted a refund so we could buy a boat from another company and sever our contact with Powercats.

So we thought that instead of pressing for a refund of over £37,000 - that although we were legally entitled to that, we could just bring a swift end to all of this by making this offer.

We offered Powercts an option (via the BMF) in the early part of June to offer us £10,000 in full and final settlement - our solicitor then got a letter calling us malicious and information from BMF that Powercats wouldn't be making that offer. 

We then offered this option officially to Powercats solicitor via email and time limited.

Powercats solicitor then contacted us with the details of a surveyor and asked us to make an appointment ASAP for this surveyor to visit from Corfu and examine the boat.

We contacted the surveyor within hours of that email and we arranged for Powercat's surveyor to visit. 

We would meet him at the airport and drive him to the boat where he could carry out his survey.  He said he would confirm arrangements with Powercats and get back to us.  A week later we had heard nothing regarding this survey and whether it was still happening. 

We phoned the surveyor to find him unable to fulfil the appointment as Powercats had not committed to the survey. 
They were aware of the appointment we had made in accordance with their request within hours of it being made. 
Yet they were unwilling to let us know that it had been called off and we were yet again forced to run around trying to find out what was going on, only to find out the answer was that our time had been wasted, again.

We were given indications that Powercats would accept the £10,000 offer, but that they wanted certain conditions applied.  We provisionally agreed to the conditions.  It was after we provisionally agreed to the conditions that we were asked to contact the surveyor.

The offer has now expired and we have not had an acceptance. Instead we have yet again been mucked about and experienced the special communication that has been characteristic in their attitude towards us.

Oh and Kernow Crusader - before you start, this is all true and we have documentary evidence to back it all up.