Tag archives for Henry Woods

Sydbank’s Offer To Settle Turned Down

4th February 2013 by admin under Legal Action     

Undeterred by the scandal that hit the press in Denmark 1 year ago which meant, among other things, the closing down of Sydbank Switzerland (to presumably prevent further reputational damage), Sydbank Denmark’s lawyers in Spain are still convinced their customer did nothing wrong and so, have offered a meagre 40% of the portfolio losses to their victims/customers, leaving out of the base to calculate compensation mortgage payments, costs, legal fees etc.

Naturally, the offer was promptly rejected.

Let’s remember what this bank did during its very short, yet extremely damaging time in Spain, which those lawyers consider to be “acceptable”:

  • Opened an office in Fuengirola without letting the Bank of Spain know.
  • Offered British customers a perfectly sound and legal Inheritance tax “avoidance” scheme, in partnership with Nykredit, whereby unencumbered properties would be mortgaged with a loan offered by the latter, the proceeds being dispatched to a Swiss account held by a Belize-based offshore company, all of it devised, arranged and managed by the former.
  • Used an unregulated IFA based on the Coast.

At the same time, the lawyers:

  • Denied having offered an Equity Release Scheme with Nykredit.
  • Denied any relationship with Nykredit, alleging that it was the borrower who contacted both, separately.
  • Denied having had a contract with any IFA on the Coast, blaming the customers for “hiring” the IFA.
  • Confirmed that if Inheritance Tax was the purpose of the contract, it would have been the customer’s motivation and not the bank’s.
  • …
  • …
  • …Denied that the earth was round

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Rothschild: we never provided financial advice

3rd February 2013 by admin under Legal Action     

One of the many excuses Rothschild put forward to excuse themselves of any wrongoing (and they have a case ready of excuses, just in case!) was that, when shamefully selling the nefarious CreditSelect loan (the mortgage loan which should not be seen as one thanks to “Rothschild conservative approach”), they never provided financial advice. 

The reality is different: Rothschild not only provided tons of financial advice (abundancy of literature proves this), they actually selected the funds where the monies were to be invested in and there was no compromising in this.

For the pensioners, there was no reason to distrust their set up, as they put it:

Thanks to Rothschild’s conservative approach, clients will not be exposed to unnecesary risks

Mike Atherton has a very interesting column in the Money Section of The Times and very much line with the above, wrote an article yesterday (2/2/2013) titled When advice is not advice.

 

One of my Times Money colleagues recently sat in on a consultation her mother had with a mortgage expert. Strictly speaking, the expert was not offering advice but “information” about mortgages. However, as the conversation ranged over different mortgage products and her mother’s available options, my colleague could not help feeling that, whatever the official label, this felt more like advice than simple information.

 

This blurring of the distinction between information and advice is not confined to the mortgage market. The entire financial services industry is full of grey areas where consumers may think they are receiving one thing, when in fact what they are officially being given is something rather different.

 

The problem is especially acute in the investment world. Over the past 20 years a range of execution-only intermediaries, including discount brokers and investment platforms, has sprung up to offer investors a vast amount of information and research, but not advice.

 

They are competing for business with financial advisers, who, as the name implies, do give advice, as well as offering access to research and financial data.

 

So you have advisers on the one hand and intermediaries on the other, both helping investors with their investment choices and both offering them the benefits of their research and analysis. Investors could be forgiven for failing to spot the difference.

 

But the distinction is important because investors should be crystal clear about whether they are receiving financial advice or not. If they mistakenly think they are, they could be lulled into a false sense of security about the appropriateness of the product they are buying.

 

Some financial advisers suspect that their execution-only only rivals have not exactly been unhappy about the blurring of distinctions. The more cynical point to the many cases where intermediaries have drawn up lists of their preferred funds, or produced glossy booklets highlighting a small number of carefully selected funds, while making no mention of the rest.

 

What, the cynics ask, does this represent, if not a recommendation to buy certain funds and ignore others? The intermediaries would respond that they always issue a clear disclaimer that none of the information they provide should be construed as amounting to a recommendation or advice. But the cynics say that if it looks like advice, sounds like advice and feels like advice, investors are going to consider that it is advice.

Does anyone still believe today that Rothschild did not provided financial advice?

How much longer can they persist in pursuing this grand larceny?

 

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SPAIRS: Cunning Names and Henry Woods

10th December 2012 by admin under Legal Action     

SPAIRS , the Spanish Property and Income Release Scheme, concocted initially by Charles Walton, from Premier Group, and later adopted by greedy banks and rogue IFAs such as Henry Woods, caused extensive havoc. 

Reading the attached article, it compares well with that of Dewsnip, from Rothschild (published on the post of the 6th December) , from which it has taken full inspiration; in fact, we think that either party should take action for plagiarism.

 

 

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Former Rothschild Lawyer Failed to Spot Fraudulent Valuation

19th July 2012 by admin under Legal Action     

Rothschild should have known a thing or two about mortgaging properties, one would have thought. And presumably one would have thought that, had Mr. Steven Dewsnip been in doubt as to the legality of his spurious Equity Release Scheme, sold as SPAIRS by a close collaborator (Henry Woods, illegal Costa financial operator), sound legal advice could have been easily accessed by the endless pot enjoyed by the Rothschild family.

And so they did, choosing the sixth Spanish firm by revenue, Gomez-Acebo & Pombo.

Interestingly though, the lawyer acting for the above firm (PDF), Mr. Luis Sánchez Pérez, failed to spot one very serious breach of Spanish Banking Laws incurred in by Rothschild: the document used to assess the value of the property (PDF) was not legal, since it was drawn up by a company not authorized by the Bank of Spain, under no circumstance, to produce valuations for mortgage purposes, in Spain.

His shortsightedness has only recently been exposed, after the ERVA closely inspected all documents delivered by victims of this sham, but far from trying to cover up he chose to indulge in publishing self-aggrandizement articles (PDF) that, coincidentally, talks about the…Spanish Equity Release.

This is what he says:

 “world globalization allowed the reverse mortgage to be introduced in Spain, particularly with the first contigent of British expat that settled in the Spanish coasts…”

 “the majority of the population that chose warmer climates have come to Spain to spend the best years of their lives, albeit with limited financial resources that are obvious in people who live off pensions and that, additionally, have seen the value of these dwindling as a result of the unfavourable exchange rates…”

“In situations where there is a lack of liquidity, a good option is the reverse mortgage…”.

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