The Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the accountancy and auditing watchdog, has opened an investigation into two individual accountants that worked for Vistry in relation to forecasting and financial reporting within the South division of Vistry Group in 2023 and 2024.
In October 2024 Vistry discovered that nine development sites in the south of England had been wrongly costed. No explanation was given of why the costs were wrong – out by £165m – but there was reported speculation that someone somewhere had forgotten to factor in inflation, a major factor in Vistry’s new partnership model that agrees what customers will pay before construction starts. Conventional speculative housing developers, by contrast, can just put prices up on completion if build costs have gone up.
The FRC said that its investigation related only to the two unnamed individuals, and not the company itself. “It would not be fair to treat any part of this announcement as constituting or evidencing an investigation into any other persons or entities,” it said.
Vistry said that the individuals no longer worked for the company and said it would “cooperate fully with the investigation and provide any assistance required”.
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