A retired chartered financial planner has branded the FCA “cavalier and thoughtless” for urging investors to complain about what he has dubbed a “well-run” fund.
Lincoln-based Terence O’Halloran has written to the watchdog and the Treasury select committee attacking the FCA’s warnings about the EEA Life Settlements Fund.
In September the FCA said: “We believe that some of you who invested in a fund called EEA Life Settlements are likely to have been missold the product.”
The fund, an unregulated collective investment scheme based in Guernsey, is made up of traded life insurance policies, also known as death bonds, whereby investors hope to benefit by buying the right to insurance payouts on the death of the original policyholder.
The FCA, and its predecessor the FSA, have warned that the products are “high-risk” investments, unsuitable for retail investors.
But Mr O’Halloran, writing to the FCA and TSC, said: “The impaired lives assured within the second-hand policies are independently assessed medically by experienced medical specialists and the purchase price calculated by experienced actuaries. Yet they are deemed by the FCA risky?”
Right to reply
The FCA, whose predecessor received a similar complaint from Mr O’Halloran in January 2012, responded to his latest letter saying: “This type of complaint is excluded from the complaints scheme because it relates to the performance of the regulators’ legislative functions, including making rules and issuing codes and general guidance.”
