Leaked audio reveals strata giant caught asking contractor for kickbacks

For nearly 30 years, James* had operated under a simple assumption about the building services game: you pitch a competitive price, you deliver high-quality work, and the best quote wins.

But two minutes into a phone call on a weekday afternoon last month, the veteran contractor got the shock of his career.

He was pitching for a lucrative contract to execute major, multi-month project works on a luxury waterfront apartment block in Geelong, worth about $200,000. On the other end of the line was the building’s strata manager from Ace Body Corporate Management, one of Australia’s largest strata management firms.

“Two minutes in, I began to smell a rat,” James recalled. “Certain questions were being asked ... I got this gut feeling that something wasn’t adding up.”

What followed, James said, was a brazen proposition that left the veteran contractor floored. The strata manager was not looking for the best deal for the apartment owners. Instead, he was looking to clip the ticket on the contract, explicitly soliciting a 10 per cent kickback in exchange for rigging the competitive tendering process.

“I was quite literally gobsmacked,” James said. “I was just like, ‘wow’. This is the first time in the strata side of things that someone has been that brazen to suggest that they need a kickback. Quite frankly, it’s not that often I get lost for words. I felt like I’d been struck across the face with a fish.“

The leaked audio recording of the conversation, obtained exclusively by The Age, captures a rare example of what is often suspected – but difficult to prove – in the sector: a strata manager soliciting unlawful kickbacks from commercial contractors.

In the recording, strata manager Nieraj Sachdev – one of the Geelong branch managers – offers to actively mislead the building’s elected owners committee and subvert democratic tender processes behind the backs of unsuspecting apartment owners to secure corporate “referral fees”.

The revelation comes amid an ongoing regulation crisis in apartment living in Victoria, with consistent calls to overhaul legislation and clean up the sector.

In the conversation with James, Sachdev openly claims control of the apartment building’s project works, and frames the kickback as standard corporate practice for Ace.

Sachdev responds: “Yeah, a percentage paid to us, or like a fixed fee ... because we are referring this business to you guys. And we’ll try to make sure, obviously ... that this comes to you.”

When James pushes for clarity on where the financial “benefit” actually goes, the manager is unambiguous: the money