1st September 2010

"The FSA speak with forked tongue"?

IFA letter of the week

In CP09/18 - The Retail Distribution Review (RDR) paper the FSA encouraged advisers to make better use of structured products in their advice to consumers!

Now with the benefit of hindsight they changed their mind. Having failed to regulate structured products and their providers, in the FSA's recent (October 2009) paper on the collapse of Lehman's, they blame advisers for the promotion of the very products they advocated in CP09/18.

Much worse they now point consumer redress at the IFA's pocket in full knowledge that the IFA is set up as a regulatory compensation "patsy", the subject of the FOS (the S stands for Stasi) and its lack of an Appeal process which is thought to offend the "fair trial" provisions of Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights ECHR incorporated into law by the Human Rights Act 1998.

Are we to take these regulatory standards as an example of Treating Customers Fairly?

Thank God we live in a free and fair country governed by the rule of law rather than by an unelected, unrepresentative quasi judicial quango?

Yours sincerely
Simon Mansell
Temple Bar IFA Ltd

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