Tony
Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday's ace investigator, fighting
readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and
winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out
how to contact him below.
A.T.S. writes: About
eight or nine years ago, my wife and I thought about taking out an
equity release scheme on our bungalow, but in the end chose not to go
ahead with it.
Now
that we are both in our 70s, we decided to restart the process with
Aviva, only to be told that we already have a scheme running with
Northern Rock and have already supposedly drawn thousands of pounds. We know nothing about this and have never had any such money.
On the face
of it, this is a scandal. My first thought was that in the dying days of
the now defunct Northern Rock, someone had put through your enquiry as a
firm application, registered a mortgage against your home, but then
failed to pay out the cash.
I
checked with the Land Registry. Sure enough, there is a 2006 charge
registered against your property, showing that you owe money to an
offshoot of JP Morgan. I also spoke to the bank and it confirmed it had
taken over Northern Rock’s equity release business, including the charge
against your home.
However, all
the paperwork was handled by yet another company, Capita, so I made
contact with it and explained the problem again. Capita could not have
been clearer. It has a mortgage deed signed by you and your wife, and
its records show that £29,400 was paid out by Northern Rock to
solicitors Preston Goldburn, who acted for you at the time. Most of that
money went to pay off your debts, Capita believed.
When
I put this to you, you remembered that you had in fact signed the
mortgage deed, but you told me this was on the understanding it would
not be used unless you later decided to go ahead. You also said that you
knew nothing about the £29,400 used to pay off your debts.
So,
my next stop was Preston Goldburn, the solicitors in Falmouth,
Cornwall. They acted for you, not Northern Rock, and everything they did
was in response to instructions from you or your wife. The firm was
completely open in what it told me.
With your
consent, Henry Preston handed over about 80 pages of documents and
letters going back to 2005. These records show that in 2005 a credit
company went to Cardiff County Court and obtained an order blocking any
sale of your home until you or your wife repaid money owed. Your wife
told the solicitors she remembered the debt but thought a relative had
repaid it for her.
Preston
Goldburn sent you a long letter, confirming you were borrowing £29,400
from Northern Rock. You and your wife signed the mortgage deed and the
deal went ahead. The solicitors sent £13,134 to credit company Asset
Link to pay off your debt, and a further £14,005 went to Lloyds TSB to
pay off two roughly equal bank debts, one in your name and the other in
your wife’s.
After
costs, all that was left was £768. This was sent to your bank account,
and the solicitors sent you a statement showing where every penny went.
They also sent you a copy of the deed you signed, and a copy of the Land
Registry record showing Northern Rock’s mortgage over your home.
Faced
with this evidence, I find it hard to understand how you can say you
know nothing about Northern Rock and never went ahead with the 2006
mortgage.
Surely
you would have asked questions as soon as you saw the deed and Land
Registry records? Surely you would have wondered why Asset Link was no
longer expecting £13,134 or why Lloyds TSB had stopped pressing for its
£14,005? Even the state of your bank account changed. You were overdrawn
until the £768 landed and put you back in the black.
I
have been over all of this with you. You eventually remembered that the
Asset Link debt was a loan for a new kitchen, but you could not explain
why you might have thought this had already been paid off before 2006.
The
blunt facts are that you and your wife were badly in debt in 2006, and
those debts were repaid from a new loan, the one from Northern Rock. You
are fortunate that your home is worth more than the £40,000 – including
interest – that you now owe, and that there is nothing to stop you
staying in the house for life.
But
it would be a brave lender who offered you more credit when you clearly
have trouble recalling who you owe, how much you owe and why.
Boxing pro’s nickname floored life insurer
M. N. writes:
I have a Friends Life policy that I took out 50 years ago, and I pay a
monthly premium of just over £2 by direct debit. Currently, the
beneficiary would be my former wife, but I wish to change this to name
my present spouse. I have been in touch with Friends Life and I spoke to
a helpful person, but after half an hour on the phone they were unable
to find my policy.
Clearly your premiums have been going somewhere, so I asked Friends Life to try again to track down your policy.
I
am glad to report that it has been traced. Part of the problem is that
you used to be a professional boxer under a variation of your name, and
you still use both names today.
On
top of this, a reorganisation a long time ago meant that your policy is
not now registered under its original number, which is perhaps why it
was hard to find.
Friends
Life has since made contact with you and all you need to do is supply a
simple statement, changing the beneficiary. Your policy provides an
assured sum of £2,000, or if you would like to cash it in now, the
surrender value is £916.
Ban for firms selling program that ‘guaranteed’ Footsie wins
Banned: D-Corporation Limited
Four
companies involved in selling a computer program that was supposedly
guaranteed to pick stock market winners have been ordered into
liquidation by the High Court.
The
ruling comes after the Insolvency Service found evidence that sales
literature included false claims, phoney testimonials, fake magazine
articles recommending the program, and fictitious awards from financial
bodies.
D-Corporation
Limited, Direct Technologies Limited, Stock Market Charting Programs
and Data Specialists Limited, and On Demand Sales Consultants Limited
claimed their trading system could make over three billion calculations a
day to meet investors’ needs.
The
program was priced at £9,900, but customers were told they only needed
to pay half up front. A guarantee promised there would be no further
payment due until profits topped £30,000.
I
named three of the four firms (somehow On Demand Sales Consultants
stayed under the radar) in February last year, along with their bosses. I
also revealed that the phone number for one of the institutions that
awarded a prize for the program actually belonged to one of the firms
selling it.
I
warned that the guarantee did not cover the initial £4,950 cost, so if
the program didn’t make a penny investors would be out of pocket and the
sales firms would keep the cash.
Welcoming
the court’s order to close the firms, Insolvency Service investigator
Chris Mayhew said: ‘This investment opportunity was as dodgy as the
testimonials. No one made any money apart from those behind the
companies, and the guarantee of profits or all of your money back was as
elusive to investors as the firms themselves.’
The
investigation found that the four crooked firms raised at least £1
million from sales of the program. No prosecutions have been brought and
the crooks have been allowed to keep the money.
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