Residents of a Chonburi housing development are demanding a refund after discovering that the village management company they’ve been paying for 18 years was a gang of scammers.
How it never dawned on the more than 1,000 homeowners at Family Park Village in Muang District that the “common fees” they’ve been paying since 2004 for the housing project’s maintenance were going into the pockets of a corrupt police officer and other grifters is beyond comprehension. But the collective lightbulb finally went on last year when tax collectors from Napah Subdistrict came to do a village survey.
About 50 residents – red-faced out of both anger and embarrassment – protested at the gates of Family Park Village, demanding the project’s landowner and police hold the supposed juristic company liable for fraud and to return the estimated 40 million baht paid out in the past 18 years.
One of the duped residents, Netnapa Tumong, 43, said Family Park Village was built in 1993 but never had a juristic office until 2004 when a group of people who posed as a management company set up shop in a neighborhood office. They began charging 150-200 baht a month in “common fees” to cover street maintenance, garbage collection and upkeep of communal facilities, such as the swimming pool and playground.
Yet for nearly two decades, no one questioned why, despite the money they were paying were the streets unlit, the playground infested with snakes and the pool unusable.
Outraged residents want the supposed “managers” out and for Napha to take over management of the neighborhood, including putting in streetlights.
 |
 |
 |
