Over Charged for Water usage - Debt Collectors after me

My wife and I own Amapondo Backpackers in Port St Johns. We have suddenly been hit by an OR Tambo Municipality water bill of R320 000! We have not received a water bill from the Municipality in several years, despite our persistent requests for one. We therefore paid an estimate each month based on previous bills - which was generally around R2000 per month. Without warning however, we have been handed over to debt collectors who claim that the actual bills were much higher, sometimes in the range of R25000 to R45000 in a month! This is impossible of course - we are a small business and could not have used that much water, unless there was a leak. We are totally shocked - we have not received a bill in years, nor any indication there was a problem, and then suddenly, without warning, we are being threatened by debt collectors! We started to investigate and discovered that when all our taps are turned off and our meter has stopped running, the municipal meter continues to spin like crazy. Then we found a major leak next to the Municipal Water meter, which is beyond our perimeter fence. When we informed the Municipality about the leak, they ignored us, and now, suspiciously, they have changed the meter. (The leak is still there however, which means we are still being charged these astronomical amounts! We have had to get a lawyer to represent us and to try and resolve things - an expense we simply cannot afford. It seems we are not the first people to be victims of this kind of thing. Check out this link: https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/daily-dispatch/***