The entire contents of my 3 bedroom house was stolen from Kent Removals and Storage Sydney, Villawood facility (60 Marple Road, Villawood) by an employee 9 months ago. The employee was convicted of the crime on January 13, 2016 in Bankstown Court after pleading guilty. The employee placed my container in a section of the facility where dumped containers are left, from there the entire contents of the container were taken.
Kent Removals and Storage did not show an ounce of concern for my loss for over 9 months. In fact all I received by Kent Removals was obstruction. It took them several days to contact the police, days which might have assisted in recovering some of my possessions. My phone calls were avoided, I was told different stories depending on who I spoke to, until in the end there was complete silence for over 9 months. No apology was forth coming until I wrote to them recently informing them of my intention to go public with my experience. Money cannot compensate me for the loss. I feel like my life has been erased. I was left with nothing but the two suitcases of clothes I arrived with from the USA. Only a handful of damaged items remained, strewn throughout Kent’s facility together with the empty boxes and their brown packing paper. I have not received a single item back, with the exception of a guitar that was found in the convicted employee’s home.
Some interesting notes from the Magistrate who convicted the employee in January include:
“If Kent’s storage has an arrangement whereby containers were placed in a location with an open slather rule that its employees can pilfer it—and that is the reason he put the container onto the rubbish pile so his colleagues could help themselves, I think the police should investigate that because this is a highly corrupt practice.”
“ …if people are engaging a storage facility such as Kent Storage to travel internationally to Australia and their property is in jeopardy because of some in-house rorting arrangement that needs to be known.”
Kent Removals’ handling of the matter from start to finish has been disgraceful. During the first month of this incident (July 2015), I was told by Kent Removals there was no evidence my goods had arrived intact! This was a convenient claim given my shipment had been placed in a part of the facility with no CCTV footage, this ultimately enabled this crime to occur. There was, however, CCTV footage from Botany where my goods arrived and were picked up by Kent’s, and verified all my cargo had been placed on Kent’s truck, intact and in good order. Customs also provided me with a report verifying all my items were cleared, were in good order and all 163 items had been picked up by Kent Removals.
Distressingly, the CCTV footage from Botany, which you can view here, showed that even before everything went missing, Kent Removals was mishandling my goods. It had a single employee working alone in the rain loading the contents of my entire 3 bedroom home onto his truck. He was rolling my furniture and precious artwork along the ground, presumably because it was too heavy to lift on his own.
When I arrived at Kent Removals and Storage, Villawood, I found my container with no padlock and a majority of the items missing. A day later the police found all of my household boxes emptied on the warehouse floor. The staff claimed someone must have accidentally put my possessions in the dumping area and once there I was told that the staff are allowed to take these items for themselves. Yet, not a single staff member could recall who authorized my items to be dumped, nor who took my possessions. One would have thought had it all been an innocent mistake, all of the items could easily been retrieved from the staff members who took them. Yet I am not aware of any efforts made to do this.