The processing fee comes at the outset and is not refundable. The gift follows vetting rather than preceding it, so nobody should transfer a seven-figure sum on an assurance that vetting will go well, and every step should be checked against the official programme materials on the day.
Vetting first, the gift afterwards
Sequence is the protection here, and it is a protection worth insisting on. A framework in which vetting precedes the major payment gives an applicant a natural checkpoint, and anybody encouraging a departure from that order is asking the applicant to give up the one structural safeguard the process contains. Verify each step directly against the official materials rather than through an intermediary’s summary, and keep a dated note of what those materials said when you read them. Where anything read today differs from what was understood last month, treat the newer official text as governing and re-plan around it.
Hypothetical example: an applicant from Roxton Pond is pressed to transfer the gift early on the reasoning that it will speed matters and that the funds are effectively committed anyway. Neither proposition survives contact with the published order of steps. The sensible response is to slow down, read the current official page, confirm what is payable and when, and decline to move money ahead of the stage at which it is genuinely due. Urgency applied by somebody else is not a reason to abandon the sequence the programme itself sets out.