Former employee says Hohm Energy stopped paying staff salaries

[Daniel Puchert]

Revelation about major solar company shut down in South Africa

Spark Energy Services CEO and Hohm Energy marketing director Franc Gray says the company is investigating claims that Hohm Energy didn't pay some of its staff's salaries as it entered financial strain.

This comes after news emerged this week that Hohm Energy had stopped trading and entered business rescue.

 

[The_MAC]

Rinse repeat..

SME's enter the market, things look good, demand is there, they grow.

Then the demand dries out or operational overheads balloon, the entire setup goes up in smoke..

PS: I remember chatting to my solar installer, he was an acquaintance before going into business. I remember we chatted about his growth as a business, and he said he is very reluctant to increase staff, vehicles, premises etc. As he didn't know when the "craze" would fizzle out.

So it was just him, his brother and 2 workers that he uses anyways for all his other electrical contracting work. So he is able to scale down very quickly and still keep his business afloat, albeit without the surge of work he got during load-shedding.

 

[Swa]

Gray said that Spark Energy Services views the experiment around the software as a success.

Bit reckless to do an experiment without the funds to pay people?

 

[My_King]

Bet you franc gray does not need to start the investigation with himself.

 

[entropyagent]

I can't claim to know what is happening here, but the scenario that my AI hallucinates is: A multi-millionaire is telling people who live paycheque-to-paycheque that they are just imagining the bouncing debit-orders and the bailiffs making a list of saleable items in their home.

And this bit:

He confirmed that staff were allowed to sign a mutual separation agreement. However, they weren’t forced to do so.

No one has had a gun put to their head. It was a mutual agreement.

that makes me wonder if he was cackling and twirling his moustache at the time.

My hallucination lays out the choice as:

"Sign now and get 'some' of your money in full and final settlement (from Houdenbek, Inc), maybe saving 'some' of the 'half-paid-for' things about to be repossessed"

or

"Don't sign and probably get nothing but a blacklisting"

There's probably a bit more to it than that, and my imagination does sometimes run a little wild.

 

[rvZA]

What did people think would happen? Money grow on trees and employees get paid? I do know that Government thinks so, courts think so. Just surprised there are more people thinking so too.

 

[entropyagent]

What did people think would happen? Money grow on trees and employees get paid? I do know that Government thinks so, courts think so. Just surprised there are more people thinking so too.

Silly, everyone knows money is made by Fiat.


Is it significant that in the original article, Mr Gray is introduced as:

Spark Energy Services CEO and Hohm Energy marketing director Franc Gray

but this now reads:

Spark Energy Services CEO Franc Gray

Perhaps this was just a simple error, now corrected. However, this seems to leave this statement hanging:

However, he also said that he was only recently appointed to Hohm Energy.

It might be interesting to know if the C-suite and management got paid, while employees (and perhaps clients) got....disappointed.

If it is true that there is no money, then there is no money. But if some people got paid, while others didn't, that might suggest an uneven distribution of no money?