BGC subsidiaries Ventura Home Group and J-Corp have temporarily avoided orders to fix several homes amid ongoing legal disputes over burst pipes.
Ventura and J-Corp, under the BGC group of companies, wanted to pause building remedy orders that included full home piping at four homes.
The SAT recently granted Ventura Home and J-Corp’s applications to stay, or pause, the remedy works while the builders’ review of the orders was ongoing in the tribunal.
Impacted homeowners opposed the BGC companies’ bid to stay the proceedings, claiming there had been multiple burst pipes at their properties in recent years, the SAT decisions show.
Ventura and J-Corp, which have applied to review whether the building remedy orders were valid, argued they should not have to carry out work before the reviews were finalised in the Supreme Court of Western Australia.
In her decisions, SAT deputy president judge Fiona Vernon said if the stay was not granted, Ventura and J-Corp might end up spending time and money before the review of the remedy orders was determined.
“There is no dispute that the review proceedings will not be heard and determined by the latest date that the applicants are required to perform the work,” Judge Vernon said in one of the SAT decisions.
“If the applicant then succeeds in the review proceedings, it will be in a position where it has already undertaken work it is no longer legally required to undertake.
“Self-evidently, once the applicant has done that work, it cannot be put back in the position where it has not done the work.”
A complete re-pipe of a home can take up to 16 weeks, according to the evidence submitted for the tribunal proceedings.
Judge Vernon ordered the remedy orders to be stayed pending further order of the tribunal, and for Ventura and J-Corp to undertake the affected parties’ compensation over the works being paused.
The pipes involved in the disputes were described as Typlex, Pro-Fit and Iplex, according to the tribunal’s decisions.
BGC Australia and the pipes’ manufacturer Iplex Pipelines have been in an ongoing row over burst pipes in thousands of homes, dating back several years.
Last year, law firm Baker McKenzie launched a class action in the Federal Court on behalf of people who bought Pro-fit pipes manufactured by Iplex, which were installed in about 15,000 homes in WA.
About 10 per cent of the pipes exploded and the incident was at the centre of a review by WA regulator Building & Energy.
BGC was mostly responsible for installing the pipes in WA homes and previously estimated that it could cost $700 million to fix the issues.
Iplex claimed the issue was defective installation while BGC claimed it was the manufacturing.
Following the class action, BGC launched a separate legal action against Iplex.
According to the recent SAT decisions, one of the homeowners, Timothy Cox, claimed he suffered 13 burst pipes over three years.
“Mr Cox says that the leaks have caused stress, anxiety and disruption for his family, with water leaks causing electrical faults, repeated exposure to black mould, a daily practice of turning the water off as they leave the house and living in construction conditions when repairs are being undertaken,” judge Vernon said in her decision.
“He says that he has spent over 1,000 hours of the respondents' personal time coordinating remediation work. He is concerned about the health impacts of the flooding.”
Other impacted homeowners in the tribunal proceedings claimed the piping issues caused huge mental and emotional toll, and devalued their properties.
While judge Vernon granted the stay, she dismissed Ventura and J-Corp’s applications to adjourn the proceedings, the SAT decisions show.
In her decision in the J-Corp matter, judge Vernon said granting a stay would likely delay the remedy works for about nine to 12 months while adjourning the tribunal proceedings might take years for homes to be fixed.
“The likely time to completion will certainly be longer, in my view, of at least two years, if the matter must first be heard and determined by a single judge before being taken on appeal,” she said.
“If Ventura is unsuccessful in the Supreme Court proceedings, it is likely that the review proceedings will then take a further 12 months.
“Accordingly, the respondents may be waiting up to three years or more before having an answer to whether the work under the BRO [building remedy orders] will be performed.”
Judge Vernon said, in her decisions, that preliminary works undertaken by Ventura and J-Corp might have alleviated some of the conditions to some extent.
