The contract was signed in good faith. The broker found a deal. The bills arrived and were paid without question. Nobody told you that somewhere in the unit rate, money was being skimmed and paid to the person who was supposed to be acting in your interests.
Why multi-year contracts made this worse
What makes undisclosed energy commissions particularly damaging for businesses is the time dimension. Energy contracts typically run for one, two, or three years, and many businesses renewed through the same broker repeatedly. Each renewal presented a fresh opportunity for an undisclosed commission to be embedded in the rates, and in many cases it was.
A business that relied on the same broker for five or six years could be looking at a very substantial total commission paid across multiple contract cycles. The individual unit rate difference on any given invoice may have seemed unremarkable, easily absorbed into the general cost base and never questioned. The cumulative effect, once calculated properly, was often a significant sum that the business had paid out without knowing it had any alternative.
Why it went undetected for so long
Energy pricing is not transparent. Unit rates vary between suppliers for entirely legitimate reasons, including contract length, annual volume, payment terms, credit risk, and prevailing market conditions. A business receiving a quote through a broker had no straightforward way to determine whether the rate quoted was what the supplier was actually offering, or an inflated version designed to fund a commission that would never appear on any document the business ever saw.
Brokers who operated this way were not advertising the practice. They presented the rates as market prices. In many cases they described themselves as independent advisers acting in the client's interest. The mechanisms that allowed the commission to be quietly embedded were entirely invisible to the client, and they were designed to be.
The individual monthly difference looked unremarkable. The cumulative effect across years of renewals was something else entirely.
The legal route that opened
Once the scale of undisclosed commission arrangements in the commercial energy market became more widely understood, legal claims began to be pursued. Courts found in favour of businesses in a number of cases. The legal basis, breach of fiduciary duty arising from a secret commission, is well established and has been applied consistently where the facts support it.
For businesses whose solicitors pursued these claims competently, the route worked and losses were recovered. For those whose solicitors made mistakes, whether missing limitation deadlines, failing to build the evidence properly, or advising acceptance of inadequate settlements, the window on the underlying claim may have closed. But a different window, on a professional negligence claim against the solicitor who let the original case fail, may still be open. That is the question worth asking now.
What businesses in this position should do now
For businesses that overpaid through undisclosed commissions and have not yet pursued a claim, or whose claim was pursued and failed, the starting point is the same: an independent assessment of where they stand. That means understanding whether the limitation period for a direct claim against the broker is still running, whether a solicitor who previously handled a claim did so competently, and what routes remain available given the specific facts.
Many businesses in this position have assumed, incorrectly, that the opportunity to recover anything has passed. In a meaningful number of cases that assumption is wrong. Getting an accurate picture of the options available costs nothing and could lead to a recovery that the business had written off entirely.
For businesses that suspect they were affected but have not yet taken any formal steps, the most important thing is to get an accurate picture of the options available before more time passes. Limitation periods apply to the underlying claim against the broker and to any professional negligence claim against a solicitor who mishandled an earlier attempt. Neither deadline is indefinitely flexible, and the cost of missing either is the permanent loss of the right to claim.
Acting sooner rather than later is always the right approach where limitation periods are a factor. The assessment through Sold Short is the fastest way to understand what time remains and what the realistic options are.
Sold Short connects businesses who lost energy commission claims through solicitor error with specialist professional negligence lawyers. Free initial assessment. No win no fee.
