With profit investment plan
Low risk, no mention of loosing your capital
Guaranteed bonuses
Monthly payout of interest
Investment growth projected
Projected profit on capital of 4%, 6% 8% no mention of losses
Death Benefit
Average returns of over 10%
We don't apply MVA's if you die
You will be able to surrender the bond after 5 years without charge.
The Reality
20% loss on capital
MVA enforced to stop capital withdrawal (lose £20,000)
No monthly payout of interest (lose £10,000)
The company will continue to deduct management charges even though they have failed miserably.
Company blames losses on stock exchange when these bonds should have been in secure investments and not exposed to a full FTSE loss.
Recent FTSE rises of 12% pa have not been transferred to the MVA calculation.
You will not be able to surrender the bond without an MVA even if you die.
FSA. The Financial Services Agency
The FSA provides investment companies with protection from the law, none of these investment companies are covered by the laws of fraud & theft. They are protected by the FSA.
The FSA are supposed to be protecting investors but have no control over the daily operation of accounts. The service they provide appears to be designed to delay any action against the companies, to confuse customers and eventually, wear them down.
The FSA does Not work to protect investors from fraud, theft or bad management. It works on a very slender remit which is to supervise financial companies and push on disgruntled investors to the Financial Ombudsman.
The Financial Ombudsmen has an even slimmer remit. They only investigate complaints about mis-selling. So theft, fraud and juggling a few figures irresponsibly doesn't appear to be in anybodies remit.
There appear to be no restraints on these companies,
they just invoke the 9/11 stock market crash in 2001 and this lets them do anything they like.
There is something strange going on when the financial managers who earn over £100,000 annually, who have protected themselves with golden handshakes and gilded pensions, who boast of annual turnovers of £120 billion are actually nothing better than crooks.
They look down on their investors as sad losers who can't face up to reality.
They talk to them through highly integrated Customer Services departments that are specifically designed to keep their customers at arms length and solve none of their problems. They are completely obstructive & will not give positive advice to help their investors.
Just as long as the assets of the company are protected and the profits keep rolling in.
Bad investments are a problem for the investor not the company.
They will not help you regain any of your losses. They will not dig into their resources and repay their debt to you. A bad investment is like a bad memory, something to be buried. And that's what they do; they bury your account and your investment. It becomes a dead account & you become a non customer.
Customer Services are obstructive to investors.
Only you can remember how positive, efficient and enthusiastic the company was when they were setting up your account. Now everything has slowed down to a crawl. You want answers? You want your money back? You wait. You wait month after month after month. And still no help in sight.
I can understand that our financial institutions should be protected. As the backbone of our country they have the wealth of the nation in their hands yet their self regulation seems to have warped to the extreme. How can you have an investment that has no accountability?
How can you have a company that promises to pay you monthly interest payments & then looses 20% of the original investment.
Shop lifting is a crime, stealing millions of pounds of investors money is not
.
If it were indeed proved to be true that this investment had been managed with integrity and that unfortunately the funds had shrunk, it would be one thing. But the truth of the matter is, that the investors will never know, as no financial account is forthcoming.
In the absence of an account we must assume that this company's financial managers have been greedily gambling on the stock market, became overexposed and the investors paid the price.
Financial Corporations are a law unto themselves.
Or are they just outside the law?
Pity the government in twenty years time when all the half demented old age pensioners find that they have lost their money and their respect for law and order.
Especially those who have been caught not just once by endowment fraud or twice by investment fraud but thirdly by pension fraud.
These companies should bow their heads in shame.
They have failed their investors and locked up their capital.
As financial managers they have turned out a worse performance than any average person could manage. They have not only lost capital to the value of £20,000 they have lost interest to the value of £10,000
They have turned an investment of £80,000 into a 30% loss. Any building society or bank savings account would have provided 5% annual interest and no loss of capital.
And not a sign of an apology or an explanation or what is likely to happen in the future.
In any other industry this would illegal. This would be theft or fraud. But they have the best legal advisors, Queens Council, unlimited funds (yours) and contracts that you have probably never read.
When the stock market fell after 9/11 these bonds should not have been affected. Firstly because as a low risk investment they should never have been at risk. Secondly because the exposure to the fall would not have been 100% and thirdly because the stock exchange has now recovered from that fall.
Footsie Surges to 32-month high
Over the past 12 monthes the index has risen by 13.8%
Over the past 3 years the index is down only 1.9%
Over five years the index fell by 18%
Conclusion
Companies that have failed investors in the past should not be licensed to sell new investments.
They should also not be allowed to advertise new products in the media.
Cornhill Endowments - Serious fraud
Cornhill Insurance are contacting their customers to warn of a shortfall on their endowment policies.
This shortfall is in the range of 43% of the "Assured" sum. Last year Cornhill gave no warning of any large deficits.
They told customers that projections would be sustained as long as the 6% growth continued.
In twelve months everything has changed.
Suddenly not only do the illustrated projections show a shortfall but they now say that policy holders need a 14% growth to attain their "assured" targets. This means that either the previous years projections were concealing massive deficits which the company was trying to make good, or that they have started using endowment funds to prop up the company finances.
They are blaming 9/11 and the stock market crash for the deficits.
PENSIONS - as a percentage of average earnings
Netherlands 100 per cent
Italy 83 per cent
Luxembourg 83 per cent
Greece 80 per cent
Portugal 80 percent
Germany 65 per cent
Belgium 60 per cent
France 50 per cent
Spain 50 per cent
Denmark 40 per cent Britain 16.75 per cent
The Times 28/09/04
Stop Wasting our Money!
08/09/2004
Stop wasting our money.
We pay taxes to the government, the District Councils, the European Economic Community, VAT, Car Tax, petrol tax, alchohol tax.
Every government employee has a secure job with holiday pay, paid sick pay, a pension, travelling expenses etc. What do they do? Take 17 days a year sick, six weeks holiday & then go on strike.
MP's claim expenses for their offices, they give themselves wage rises, plug the hole in their own pension fund and then increase it.
County Council employees all have highly paid sick allowances with six months full sick pay, six months half pay and then the option of paid redundancy with a cash payoff.
District Councils sell all the local Council houses for £100 million pounds and still put up the Council tax.
Teachers, policemen, firemen, civil servants, all at it with early sick retirement.
European Commissioners wallow in a gravy train of extravagance. The European civil servants get even more of our money.
What about the workers who have no sick pay, no pension, no redundancy, no job security. Do we pay less tax?
What are we, some kind of mugs? It's all our money.
Why is it that when a bureaucrat spends money on our behalf they spend it like water?
Lets have an inquiry - £20 million, Millennium dome, - £300 million, London Olympics - £30 million.
Ordinary working class people struggle to live on low wages and pay their taxes like good honest citizens.
Ordinary businesses have to make a profit, pay wages and account for every pound they make to the tax man.
Why can't government departments & councils be as efficient financially as a private sector business?
Why aren't they accountable to us to provide an efficient and financially accountable service?
They are our employees yet they treat us like idiots.
Maxwell & the Mirror pension fraud has nothing on this lot.
What happened to the government pension?
All the money that tens of millions of people have been paying to the government for the last fifty years in the mistaken belief that they were sensibly investing it.
Ha Ha f..ing Ha. What a joke. And what does the government do? Nothing. It's not even an issue. Just silence.
Do we have accountants working on our behalf scrutinising how our taxes are spent?
No, they're spending all they're time trying to squeeze more tax out of us or covering up some insurance fraud which they inadvertently authorised.
Kev The Builder
Eurocrats
11/08/2004
A fair amount has been written about what Peter Mandelson will enjoy when he arrives in Brussels: a lavish entertainment allowance, two chauffeurs, an almost tax-free salary and what must be the most generous pension in Europe.
But Mandy is simply the most visible example of a system whose chief purpose is to look after its own. In the shadows behind him are tens of thousands of permanent staffers who enjoy similar privileges without any of the inconvenience of being in the public eye.
"Every month, I look at my payslip," an official told me the other day, "and I try to work out how my net salary can be so much larger than my gross salary." It seemed paradoxical, so I did a little digging. The first thing I found was that people who work directly for the EU institutions pay no national taxes. Instead they pay a special levy to Brussels, equivalent to a flat rate of 16 per cent. So whatever costs they load on to the rest of us through their spending programmes or their regulations, they won't be picking up the bill.
At the same time, they receive handsome bonuses. A British Eurocrat who works in Brussels gets an "expatriation allowance" equal to 16 per cent of his salary. One who stays in London while working for the EU is even luckier, with a weighting allowance of 39 per cent.
There is more: medical insurance, a pension of up to 70 per cent of final salary, a subsidy for every dependent child. Whatever the shortcomings of its member nations, no one can accuse the EU of failing to tackle Europe's demographic crisis. As well as offering a straightforward per-child dowry, Brussels pays for a string of "European Schools", open to the offspring of its employees.
There was outrage among staff a couple of months ago when, cowed by accusations of extravagance, the commission tried to withdraw its funding for these schools' ski-trips.
Best of all, it is almost impossible to lose your job. More than five years after the awesome sleaze scandal that brought down Jacques Santer's commission, not one person has been fired in connection with corruption. To be dismissed, you have to do something truly heinous, such as writing a book that criticises the euro.
Eurocrats have tenure, and know how to use it. Three quarters of the MEPs in the current parliament are new.
Yet when we met for the first time last month, we found dozens of pieces of legislation waiting for us. These Bills have been drawn up by the parliament's secretariat, which will now steer them through with only minimal interference from Euro-MPs, who are struggling to find their way around, and who are in any case more interested in their electoral fortunes at home than in the detailed proposals before them.
It is often remarked that the EU is undemocratic, in that it is run by commissioners whom no one has elected. What is less widely appreciated is that even within the parliament, notionally the accountable bit, most decisions are taken by a permanent bureaucracy which regards the MEPs as an ephemeral nuisance.
It is Yes, Minister on a gargantuan scale.
Not that we should be surprised. Sir Humphrey realised long ago that Whitehall was a backwater. Brussels is where the civil servant enjoys real power, and a salary to match - and all without having to worry about public opinion. For 300 years, Europeans fought to establish the principle that law-makers should be accountable to the people. Now, without a whimper, they are throwing it away.
Copyright Daniel Hannan (Conservative MEP)
Insurance Fraud (again)
06/06/2004
Did you know that when you ring up your friendly insurance company they now ask you for permission to use your information on an insurance database?
This, they say, may be shared with other insurance companies and their affiliated companies. (everybody)
This is their way of getting round the data protection act which is meant to stop people using confidential information for commercial advantage or profit.
If you had the temerity to object to them using your confidential information you would then be refused insurance.
So this is how the insurance companies plan to rig the policies of the future.
They will know everything about you from your estimated year of death, your hereditary illnesses, your criminal record, your credit rating. etc
So after stealing our mortgage endowments, and our pensions, they are now moving unchecked into data fraud.
Anyone like to buy a pension?