More (draft or has it been submitted?) crookedness from Aviva and pals at Linklaters?
agarnett
Posts: 1,301 Forumite
!!!!!! is this?
Over 200 pages of complete gobbledegook published under the adviser section of Aviva's website - as if an average IFA would understand any of it ...:rotfl:
It came up as a Google hit whilst I was looking for clues about whether Hamilton Life business was effected by that FCA 2015 prosecuted scandal discussed in my other thread.
So just when were they planning to explain it to the customers in plain English?? :mad:
Is there no end to this sort of stuff?
Typical sold policies affected by these involuntary changes were but a few tens of short pages of open-spaced relatively straightforward English - still a struggle for laypersons - but hey, maybe laypersons could trust professionals once upon a time, and sleep easy with those thirty pages from time to time. The insurance policies typically came with a couple of pages of open spaced easy read definitions.
Yet these people now think they can use our judiciary to nod through changes that apparently require over 200 pages of legalese. That includes over 30 pages of definitions useless to anyone but insiders in possession of knowledge of Aviva's full intent. Have Aviva no shame?
This smacks of when they (as AXA) got the High Court to nod through "reattribution " in 2001, and a 109 page "Policyholder Newsletter" dropped through my letterbox to bamboozle me with the jargon of that particular wheeze also ... and again as Aviva, when they did their reattribution despite being quizzed by the Treasury Select Committee in 2007/2008 and criticised. Also threatening me with risk of a hernia when I was expected to pick up the formal prospectus detailing that one from the floor after it almost dropped through it from the letterbox.
Clearly Aviva have no shame, and big law firms get richer by hanging on coat tails and drafting this stuff and spinning the law as a tool to redistribute risk and wealth just as they like.
Over 200 pages of complete gobbledegook published under the adviser section of Aviva's website - as if an average IFA would understand any of it ...:rotfl:
It came up as a Google hit whilst I was looking for clues about whether Hamilton Life business was effected by that FCA 2015 prosecuted scandal discussed in my other thread.
So just when were they planning to explain it to the customers in plain English?? :mad:
Is there no end to this sort of stuff?
Typical sold policies affected by these involuntary changes were but a few tens of short pages of open-spaced relatively straightforward English - still a struggle for laypersons - but hey, maybe laypersons could trust professionals once upon a time, and sleep easy with those thirty pages from time to time. The insurance policies typically came with a couple of pages of open spaced easy read definitions.
Yet these people now think they can use our judiciary to nod through changes that apparently require over 200 pages of legalese. That includes over 30 pages of definitions useless to anyone but insiders in possession of knowledge of Aviva's full intent. Have Aviva no shame?
This smacks of when they (as AXA) got the High Court to nod through "reattribution " in 2001, and a 109 page "Policyholder Newsletter" dropped through my letterbox to bamboozle me with the jargon of that particular wheeze also ... and again as Aviva, when they did their reattribution despite being quizzed by the Treasury Select Committee in 2007/2008 and criticised. Also threatening me with risk of a hernia when I was expected to pick up the formal prospectus detailing that one from the floor after it almost dropped through it from the letterbox.
Clearly Aviva have no shame, and big law firms get richer by hanging on coat tails and drafting this stuff and spinning the law as a tool to redistribute risk and wealth just as they like.
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Comments
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!!!!!! is this?
Over 200 pages of complete gobbledegook published under the adviser section of Aviva's website - as if an average IFA would understand any of it ...
If you can't understand it then perhaps you should have studied harder in your earlier life or accept it is not aimed at someone with your lower level of knowledge.I am an Independent Financial Adviser (IFA). The comments I make are just my opinion and are for discussion purposes only. They are not financial advice and you should not treat them as such. If you feel an area discussed may be relevant to you, then please seek advice from an Independent Financial Adviser local to you.0 -
Surely it is aimed at the High Court, not at IFAs, and as I have already inferred from it, it looks like it is intended to bamboozle? Who at the High Court is also an expert in Mergers and Acquisitions both legal and accounting and simultaneously in WP Fund management principles and practice?
This enormous document reads like it is a totally speculative shopping list request to allow Aviva to start making a lot of changes which it isn't allowed to make currently - so it seems Aviva wants to persuade the High Court to effectively wave through new law according to Aviva. It looks to be in similar vein to when Aviva, in two separate historical guises, viz in 2000/2001 as AXA and in 2007/8 as CGNU Life and CULAC, applied to the High Court at those points in time to ok two separate "reattribution" schemes. Having got the approvals they sought, they proceeded to ride roughshod as no doubt they always planned? It now seems they want to merge these two major books of business and create a whole new raft of law unto themselves whilst they do it.
Had you actually read the document, dunstonh, before you followed my link?
It is surely far too complex for you to assimilate as a mere IFA? If I am wrong about that, perhaps with your superior knowledge of all things Aviva related, you could rapidly knock up a more accurate and more interesting abstract than mine above, for the thousands within the MSE readership whose pension investments are potentially affected by what Aviva seems to have in mind?
By the way, can you tell us anything about an Initial Hearing for this?0 -
Axa have never had anything to do with Aviva0
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Axa have never had anything to do with Aviva
AXA sold its life and pensions book in the UK to Friends Life. Then Friends Life was bought by Aviva.
So, you are correct that there is no direct link to AXA with Aviva. However, a portion of AXA's old book has ended up with Aviva through a number of jumps. Of course, Aviva had nothing to do with decisions made by AXA when they owned the book. It wont matter to agarnett though. He is blinkered when it comes to Aviva.I am an Independent Financial Adviser (IFA). The comments I make are just my opinion and are for discussion purposes only. They are not financial advice and you should not treat them as such. If you feel an area discussed may be relevant to you, then please seek advice from an Independent Financial Adviser local to you.0 -
I rather suspect your last 5 words are redundant.0
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another thread that reminds me why I use my Ignore List.The questions that get the best answers are the questions that give most detail....0
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Yes. I should have known better.I am an Independent Financial Adviser (IFA). The comments I make are just my opinion and are for discussion purposes only. They are not financial advice and you should not treat them as such. If you feel an area discussed may be relevant to you, then please seek advice from an Independent Financial Adviser local to you.0
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I see the old guard have been out in farce
There's our "old book" Aviva lead apologist, dunstonh, and there's dear old mgdavid who still fancies him or herself as something in financial services too, but looks to be out of it.
Get over yourselves laddies.
Yes the way you put yourself about in this forum, you should know better than the deflective drivel you've written so far in this thread.
Clearly neither of you have the capacity to tackle the business at hand, so perhaps it is best left to those that might, and who have the intellectual honesty to hold no punches, that is if any good men and true in financial services still exist out there?
When it comes to UK Life Assurance and Pensions, Aviva have everything to do with AXA of course. To suggest otherwise you might also just as well say that Aviva have nothing directly to do with Norwich Union, Commercial Union or General Accident. You'd still be very wrong to do so.
And there's nothing old book about these with-profits funds - as a book of business it still very much exists and should be expertly managed and growing, not declining, which is what a less informed reader might incorrectly deduce from your silly words.
We are of course talking of multi-tens of billion pound funds - NOW in 2017 ... and THEN, just 7 years ago in 2010 when the AXA name was dropped from the fund name and provider name, but not of course from the original policies that were still very much alive in their original names.
Trouble is its our money not theirs which is so attractive to overpaid smarmy faceless types who are constantly busy drafting ever more dastardly schemes to snaffle the good bits for shareholders and leave us with their leftovers.
It is sickening that there's also a small band of self-appointed 'expert' posters on MSE who masquerade as helpers of financial services customers when they visit forums like this, but who always attempt to throw concerned customers off the scent of scandal. In doing so, they do little more than the bidding of the crooks first complained about in threads like this. The suggestion that those at Aviva now had nothing to do with the AXA decision in 2001 to devise a grossly unfair scheme of reattribution just shows blind ignorance from someone claiming to be knowledgeable.
I'll mention a name. Friends Aellas. It's current. Share capital is controlled by Aviva now. What's Aellas? AXA Equity & Law Life Assurance Society. Some really original renaming there, eh?
It's the same England & Wales registered UK company that sold me my policy nearly 30 years ago.
Another interesting name is Peter Shelley. Where was he in 2001? Well he was a director until 2004. Where is he now? Seems to have been on a raft of AXA companies until the mid noughties but sitting on a smaller raft of religious boards now, sailing off towards his own retirement perhaps? But he was active enough in 2010 to be apparently helping Sir John Chadwick report on Equitable Life alongside Michael Urmston whom we are told was ex FD at Aviva Life.
So what did Peter do in 2001, do we think, and what synergies might he and Michael from Aviva have discussed in 2010, whilst they were admiring the handiwork round at Equitable Life, and is Peter still an WP actuary now? Michael looks to be a bit of a player who seems to have retired at age 50 (as you can if you are a clever actuary I guess) but with multiple non-exec directorships of all sorts amongst what look like competing insurers but maybe it is more complicated than that
No links there then ... afterall, Aviva and AXA didn't really hook-up in public until April 2015 was it?
And dear old Andy Briggs, he's a boy isn't he? Once a young man in a hurry at the Pru by the looks of it, and even they had a sniff at reattribution but bottled it. So anyway a stint with the seamier insurance sides of banks, and then arrived at Aviva from the Friends side of the hook-up, and presto became head honcho of the combined Life and Pensions business. Nah ... no links back to AXA at Aviva now is there? AXA's old. Aviva's ... er what? Brand new? Right ... There's a saying ... There ain't nothing new under the sun.
As for my earlier question about hearing dates, I'll answer it myself since dunstonh and mgdavid didn't feel it was worth answering - the Initial Hearing for the High Court jiggery-pokery in question was 27 April 2017. Would have been nice of them if they had told policyholders, but that'd require a change in culture so a tall order ...
I see there is another hearing planned for September and policyholder representations are possible at that one. I suggest MSE ought to attend and give evidence on behalf of policyholders, but MSE, please don't make the mistake of asking dunstonh to be part of it.
If I am to be labelled as "blinkered" despite being both an AXA / Friends Life Pensions WP customer of approaching 30 years standing and as an NU/ Aviva Pensions WP customer of some dozen or more years standing, both already affected by High Court approved reattribution schemes, then dunstonh must be totally blind to say so. Perhaps he's implying my views are invalid because I am too close to the effects of all this so might be biased :rotfl:
I have spent hours on the phone to these disgracefully inadequate companies. The boys and girls they have working the phones habitually get so many things wrong at the customer service level, and haven't a clue about how WP works, yet we can see from documents like the one I mentioned in the first post, that they employ the equivalent of rocket scientist lawyers behind the scenes to work on schemes to separate existing customers from our investments :mad:
Strangely however, presumed professionals like dunstonh hardly seem to have a bad word to say about them. Maybe its a regional thing ... who knows?
Anyway, what I can say is that the habitual use of the High Court to approve these schemes of deliberate shuffling and shedding and obfuscation of ownership of funds and sub funds and "wrong pocket" funds (I kid you not - their phrase) is as wrong as it would be if Scotland Yard's Diplomatic Squad decided to start providing blindfold police escort services for cash to Caymans or Panama via any route of a voluntarily regulated money-launderer's choice. Sound a bit crazy? Yes it is, isn't it?
If you have a With-Profits pension or other investment with Friends Life or Aviva, then do question Aviva constantly. If you don't, you should know that they know full well their changes confuse customers, and write internal reports acknowledging that effect, but we also know they make conscious decisions these days not to send you enough information about your investment for fear of you actually beginning to understand what is going on.
Pester them - find out how what they are planning affects your pension. Find out how what they have already changed may have affected it. Then decide if it is fair, and if it is what you as a policyholder expected, else they will decide for you using their own interpretations, and of course with a little help from the next High Court judge they can flatter sufficiently to play along.0 -
So, you're not able to understand a legal document which means Aviva are now bad guys for drawing up legal agreements? There are 30+ pages of clear definitions/ interpretations and then those definitions are used in the rest of the document which says what's happening. The document has five initial pages of index/contents so that you can see the headlines of what areas it covers and navigate to those areas. So, if you want to follow it and have the intellectual capacity to follow it, you can follow it.!!!!!! is this?
Over 200 pages of complete gobbledegook published under the adviser section of Aviva's website - as if an average IFA would understand any of it ...:rotfl:
Businesses write legal documents all the time. If they had to write a commentary for a layman to follow exactly why they used exactly which clause in exactly what way, it would take hundreds more pages. Have you read the legal agreements between Tesco and their supply chain to explain the detailed terms of how they get baked beans on your table? Would you be disappointed if you tried to do that and found they were done in 'legal-ese'?So just when were they planning to explain it to the customers in plain English?? :mad:
You can see what they are saying to their customers about the changes which are proposed to go through in October, by visiting the consumer site https://www.aviva.co.uk/form/changes-to-our-business/ (which is also linked from the friends life landing page if the reason that the document is relevant to you is that you are an FL customer being brought under the Aviva umbrella: https://www.aviva.co.uk/friends-life/)
There are detailed FAQs for customers at https://www.aviva.co.uk/form/changes-to-our-business-questions-and-answers
The document library at https://www.aviva.co.uk/form/changes-to-our-business-document-library provides the Scheme Document you linked, example letters being sent to customers, policyholder booklets, the various Actuaries reports, expert's reports, summary of changes to the various sub-funds with draft PPFMs, phow to find out what sub-fund you are in and so on.
They could end the making of documents using legal language if they didn't want to continue operating a business.Is there no end to this sort of stuff?
However, they are not going to conduct changes to bring (for example) Friends Life policies under the Aviva pensions banner without using legal language in what they do and simply codify it as 'the gist of what we'll do, is this, and the fine detail will go undocumented'
You would expect the consumer-facing agreements to fit into a few tens of pages. However, as a regulated business, the detailed mechanics of how you transfer the assets currently operated by Friends Life Limited and Friends Life and Pensions Limited to their Aviva equivalents and what you will do with future business arising, and at the same time, proposing to transfer the annuity business of Aviva Investors Pensions Limited to Aviva Life & Pensions UK Limited... is complex and requires proper documentation way above the level of detail needed by a consumer. However, it is made available to the consumers in the document library.Typical sold policies affected by these involuntary changes were but a few tens of short pages of open-spaced relatively straightforward English - still a struggle for laypersons - but hey, maybe laypersons could trust professionals once upon a time, and sleep easy with those thirty pages from time to time. The insurance policies typically came with a couple of pages of open spaced easy read definitions.
The fact that your search engine helped you find that 'legal' document via the adviser/intermediary site does not mean it is only available on that site and not the consumer one - because you can get it on the links above. And it doesn't mean that an IFA needs to read all the 200 pages himself. For example the salient points relating to a particular sub-fund do not appear on all the 200 pages so a 200-page read is not needed ; the IFA may outsource their due diligence to other parties anyhow ; and, importantly, I would expect that information in the 200 pages is consistent with what they have put into the more 'readable' documents in the document library meaning that advice can be dispensed without having read the document lodged with the court. I haven't read Tesco plc's articles of association but I am able to shop there quite easily.
The fact that I or dunstonh have not actually read the 200 pages to see what is in that versus what is in the documents published to customers in their document library and FAQ does not make us 'apologists' for an insurance company that uses legal language when transferring business between their controlled legal entities. We are just pointing out that it's quite normal for business to be conducted like that.
Business is being transferred from multiple FL entities to Aviva and from one Aviva entity to another. It is difficult to make an agreement covering all angles for all affected policies for all of the entities, which fits on one page.Yet these people now think they can use our judiciary to nod through changes that apparently require over 200 pages of legalese.
That includes over 30 pages of definitions useless to anyone but insiders in possession of knowledge of Aviva's full intent. Have Aviva no shame?
As Aviva explained to their customers, the transfer is subject to court approval. You say 'they think they can use our judiciary to nod through changes'. Well, if you want to get court approval to do something, yes you use our judiciary. Understanding agreements is something that courts are able to do where the layman might not.
You might prefer that thousands of customers examine the legal documents personally and individually approve it rather than using a court system. However, as you mentioned that things with legal-ese in them more than a few pages long are incomprehensible to you, and you are likely not au-fait with the structure of the Aviva and FL entities and exactly what is required under law or regulation, it is quite likely that you and the other Aviva and FL customers might find it difficult to agree one way or another. Hence, having every individual customer approve it instead of a public court system approve it seems pretty unworkable. So business could never move between entities without something practical like a system of agreements between the entities approved by the court.
As you mention you haven't read, or couldn't read, the document, it is a bit far fetched to say they are shameless in producing it as part of a business process, or that the law is being 'spun'.Clearly Aviva have no shame, and big law firms get richer by hanging on coat tails and drafting this stuff and spinning the law as a tool to redistribute risk and wealth just as they like.
You seem to have an inflated opinion of yourself versus others, while getting the wrong end of the stick on a document you found by accident on site designed for intermediaries when looking for something else and angrily screaming "!!!!!!" because you couldn't understand it - and had not gone to the consumer site where it was displayed alongside the various FAQs, explanatory letters, summary of change documents etc etc which I linked above.I see the old guard have been out in farce
There's our "old book" Aviva lead apologist, dunstonh, and there's dear old mgdavid who still fancies him or herself as something in financial services too, but looks to be out of it.
Get over yourselves ladies.
Looking at the thread it seems you don't comprehend what is happening in the document you linked or documents I linked, so decided to go off on a tangential 1200-word rant at 2am naming a variety of individuals who had worked for different businesses during their career and trying to build a conspiracy theory about "overpaid smarmy faceless types who are constantly busy drafting ever more dastardly schemes to snaffle the good bits for shareholders"Yes the way you put yourself about in this forum, you should know better than the deflective drivel you've written so far in this thread.
Clearly neither of you have the capacity to tackle the business at hand
Many financial services customers do get an extremely large amount of free help and guidance from such 'experts' which for some will be incredibly valuable.It is sickening that there's also a small band of self-appointed 'expert' posters on MSE who masquerade as helpers of financial services customers when they visit forums like this
The free help that people get from your posts generally amounts to "don't trust financial services businesses, if you don't understand absolutely everything, question and challenge it in case you get screwed over". Some may say that's a little paranoid but there is certainly nothing wrong with the advice to constantly question things, within reason. That in itself is reasonably sound. The problem is you tend to obfuscate that central sound piece of advice with long diatribes, personal attacks and passionate 'characterful' prose. This means that the value of what you post is considerably diluted, because many readers will write you off as a crackpot.0 -
I do not wish to directly engage with the detail of the rant, except to say that i have intimate knowledge of the reattribution process run by Aviva, and both Aviva and Friends Life With Profits operation.
It is a very technical area, and subject to a great deal of internal and external scrutiny.
The whole "With Profits" market is indeed shrinking, as the cost of operation and lack of transparency about the process make it relatively expensive and risky for the companies to operate.
The reattribution process has been a little controversial; in simple terms the WP funds have built up a surplus over the hundreds of years they have been in operation. Aviva wanted to clear down this surplus by the process of reattribution, whereby policyholders would be given 90% of the surplus and the company would get the 10%. This was a voluntary scheme, in that policyholders were not forced to give up their rights to the "inherited estate".
An independent person, Claire Spottiswoode, was appointed as a Policyholder Advocate and was pretty robust in ensuring the interests of the policyholders were firmly upheld
The current high court process is a "Part VII transfer", whereby different WP funds are generally merged or otherwise combined to ease administration. It's a lengthy process and laboriously technical, hence the high court and 200+ page arcane document to ensure PH interests are fully met.
I am no apologist for Aviva - it has a lot of challenges - but in my view the culture, governance and operation over their WP is pretty sound and there are sufficient avenues of redress (complaints, FOS escalation, policyholder advocate process) to answer concerns.
I will not be commenting further and stoking any debate, as I do not feel it will be productive.0
This discussion has been closed.
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