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Memorable Cases – Dr H’s FSAVC Pension Plan sale
Dr H explained that she had been given terrible advice in the mid 2000s in relation to a property development and she and her husband (another doctor) had very nearly been made bankrupt in 2011.
Memorable Cases – Mr M’s FSAVC Pension Plan with Aviva
Mr M is in his early 60s and spent his whole career as a teacher, joining the profession at age 23. In the early 1990s he was advised by Colonial Mutual (now part of Aviva) to top-up the benefits he was building up in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme with an FSAVC pension plan.
Memorable Cases – Mr & Mrs A and their Aviva endowment policy
Mr A was unhappy that Aviva had not given him any prior warning before the policy matured that it was performing so poorly. Aviva had failed to send Mr A any of the shortfall warning letters that regulatory rules demanded it send.
Memorable Cases – Bank’s refusal to consider the case
Mrs W is an elderly widow and was advised to put more than half her savings into a Lloyd’s structured investment product. It performed poorly (naturally) and matured after five years with little in the way of profit.
Memorable Cases – Structured investment
A structured investment is the catch-all term often used to describe a product whose returns are linked to the performance of a stock market index, but with some underlying guarantee in case the market suffers a major fall.
Memorable Cases – Mortgage Protection Insurance
I find that a salesman will often try to sell a Rolls Royce when a Ford would do the job. Why? A Rolls Royce costs more and earns the salesman more.
Miss H’s case is a typical example of this.
Memorable Cases – Business Loans
This is a classic case of mis-selling, showing how even a highly intelligent person can be led up the garden path by their bank. Mr D was (and still is) an accountant, but was branching out into a secondary business with a partner.
Pension Transfer – SIPPs
Beware of advisers offering a pot of gold.
Although cold calling has been banned, I continue to be contacted by people that had a call out of the blue from an independent financial adviser, asking about old pension scheme benefits.
Memorable Cases – Vanished Inheritance
Mrs H was referred to me by her new financial adviser, whose clients I had helped in the past. He was concerned that an investment portfolio established by a previous adviser had lost a considerable amount of money – perhaps as much as £1 million – through poor choice of investments.
Memorable Cases – Signature Forgery
This is the story of one that is probably one of the most satisfying cases I have dealt with in recent years. Mr M initially came to me through a referral from another client. Initially, the case seemed a pretty straightforward payment protection insurance case.
