More (draft or has it been submitted?) crookedness from Aviva and pals at Linklaters?

Thank you jamesd for the spot, and particularly for reminding us again of the library link on the Friends Life website. I guess there must be a similar one on the Aviva website, but I haven't looked hard for it yet because there is so much to read.

However, we see that going forward, court dates have been set for 13 September in London, and again two more dates for Guernsey and Jersey Courts (the latter two hearings no doubt being a Bergerac / Charlie Hungerford's mates type shoo-in).

Anyway, I have been dipping into some of the huge documents left on the Friends Life website for any policyholders who pitch up in the right place.

One in particular is the so-called Independent Expert's Report drafted by and Ernst & Young employee who makes no bones out of the fact his firm runs a number of projects for Aviva. Now that's good old City independence for you :rotfl:

He seems very comfortable to sign his name to having no concerns. I suppose if your back is covered by EY and by Aviva and you get paid well, you can sign anything you like and your employer likes and your employer's customer likes during your employ. Hell, if the money is good, you don't even have to like it. You can always repent later in comfortable retirement.

I myself have even signed on behalf of a live Aviva company. Hasn't anyone with a degree of financial services experience? They are Soo...oo, so big - you can't really avoid bumping into them in the City. No? Perhaps not. Well I can tell you it is very easy. You find out from your employer what the document you are to issue is supposed to look like, you arrange for it, and double check that it does, and then you sign. And you get paid for it. Next?


The closest I have found so far to a detracting feature from the Independent Expert whilst dipping into dear David's very own 200+ page report full of acronyms which his employer's customer no doubt bid him to use, is that he has noted something awry in the consistency of the accounts for the Aviva WP fund as published last year and the accounts as they are declared for the purposes of the Part VII transfer.

When I was taught how to write balanced reports about insurance risk, I was taught to temper a balance between commenting upon desirable risk features with comments about less desirable features.

David King FIA seems to have no concerns about everything in the garden cos it's rosey. Maybe at EY they issue special glasses.

However, much to my surprise, he states he relies upon Aviva's own for there being a good reason for the difference. I cannot help raise an eyebrow at the irony of someone claiming to be an independent expert and one employed by one of the world's very largest accountancy practices at that, who notices a discrepancy in the accounts and then waves it through trusting those who created the discrepancy - as you do I guess if you wish to run with the hounds in the City these days? Maybe I read it wrong - he used a lot of words to say what he said - but I don't think I did.

Oh well, lot's more reading to do now as an AXA/Friends Life WP policyholder, and yet to discover the hopefully somewhat mirrored version on the aviva.co.uk website library round the back somewhere to satisfy my concerns as an NU/Aviva WP Section 32 Pension policyholder - a pension which originally was a DB Scheme with funds in yet another Aviva company that appears in all this bumpf (under a new name of course and new acronym to go with it).

Meantime, I do thank David King FIA for an update on my own uniqueness at the so called CGNU/CULAC Aviva UKLAP 2009 Reattribution Scheme (which incidentally is a previous High Court and Policyholder Advocate approved scheme which is proposed to be unceremoniously dumped as part of this Transfer - just a transfer? My R sss !) ...

Yes, I thought I was part of the 13% of the CGNU/CULAC WP Policyholder base who said up yours to the 2009 bribe (apparently it wasn't a bribe - it was a 'PIP' - Aviva Customer Service staff please note) ... So an update as I was saying - I find out now from David that I was in fact part of not 13%, not even 12%, but a pathfinding 11.75% of the policyholder base who said up yours in 2009.

I also said up yours to AXA in 2001 so I guess I might claim to be one in a hundred or maybe one in ten thousand who has been intimately involved in two reattribution scams, and saw straight through both at the time ...

I can see through this latest scam too - currently my Section32 transfer values are quoted with an extra 9% on top which reflects my special status as a up yours type customer - it is currently worth around five grand plus - what will happen to that when the WP Committee and UKLAP board review it in December after the proposed reorganisation having dumped the 2009 Reattribution Scheme and its Old With Profits Fund Inherited Estate review requirements? I was offered a bribe of less than a grand in 2009 to hand over my 90% right to investment returns on inherited estate. A suddenly disappeared 500% growth rate in the guise of a unique bonus on the amount of the 2009 "Policyholder Incentive Payment" I refused, ought to ring alarm bells at FCA PRA HMG and the Courts, but will it?

ex-pat scot with his Aviva Staff Pension Scheme membership subsidised by regular raids on inherited estate in my With-Profits fund will no doubt find more guilty pleasure in that question.

You see you probably have to have been around With-Profits policies on both sides of the fence and maybe bought a few in your time in order to understand how corrupt the funds have become. I have had eight over the decades with three different original providers. All of them ended up on Clive Cowdery's/Andy Brigg's Resolution radar. And who is in charge of this latest?

As I implied previously, you are writing here on this thread like a kid, steam-powered. Why? Grow up, and then maybe you will one day thank your lucky stars when you want to get some higher education that we got a Labour Government on 8 June 2017 that promises to abolish tuition fees.

The sad thing is that I deduce elsewhere that you already got some, so maybe your intention here is just to spoil and rubbish very valid and major concerns. Again, why?

Meantime, I am becoming more and more astounded at the tangle of the tentacles certain actuaries have had wrapped up in enormous rafts of companies. Actuaries are supposed to be trustworthy professionals. They have long occupied pedestals supposedly earned through possessing very superior skills in sophisticated mathematics! Why now are mathematicians so regularly required to direct companies? Is it a fact that basically actuaries are more often now totally mercenary, and are in fact "experts" for sale? Wolves in sheep's clothing? Foxes in charge of henhouses?

Should we consider them just as responsible for the worst excesses of the financial crisis as the traders? I noted one of the actuaries named earlier in this thread served on an AIG company board. AIG cost Obama's administration (and all of us) an absolute packet to bail out! Or are actuaries far more resilient than traders - a bit like Logan/Wolverine ? Are they closer to the profiles of actual Mister Bigs who plan crisis as a means of cracking open funds, and opening them up to asset stripping schemes like the 2017 Scheme as a means of siphoning off our wealth whilst we are encouraged to believe that consolidation and change is necessary for our benefit?

Actuaries are not company secretaries. It is company secretaries whom in my experience were the most likely to serve as officers on multiple sub-boards within parent companies - for fairly obvious reasons. But actuaries? At one point a few decades ago, in-house accountants were often destined to rise to the top of the heap. But actuaries are not typical accountants, nor even accountants at all. So why in the context of this thread do they crop up as directors of so many companies - shell companies in some cases?

I note Andy Briggs is an FIA too, and he's been a director of over 50 companies including a dissolved shell company which even unashamedly has the word "shell" in its name (and is nothing to do with petroleum spirit!)

Even Bloomberg.com can't even keep up with the tangle - at the top of this article (expand link to 'Read Full Background') they say Andy Briggs has been CEO at Friends Life Group Limited since June 2011, and near the bottom they say he has been a director of Friends Life Group Limited since March 2013 - !!!!!!?

And within one click there's even a Goldman Sachs connection who served or still does serve (I can't quite tell) in Aviva Grupo :eek:

What's of interest to Goldmans in Aviva? Oh yeah, right ... silly me ...

What's really going on? Maybe this was the clue earlier last month ... http://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/174528/aviva-the-lean-mean-cash-generating-machine-174528.html

How many businesses have you been a director of bowlhead99? Why is yours a dull day without my input? Shells are indeed a bit boring to count and maybe they smell a bit of fish? Hopefully your days are more colourful than that!

Maybe yes I can put two and two together and make more than five. How many can you make?

Look, I have had to spend far too much time already looking at this because you MSE regular pension adviser/commentator types seemingly cannot be R ssed to do so.

My summation right now is that the 2017 Scheme as they are calling it at Aviva is just as big a reorganisation as the 2001 Reattribution scheme at AXA and the 2009 Reattribution Scheme at Aviva. It looks to me as if it is probably another Reattribution by the back door, and just a month or so ago Mark Wilson promised some kind of return of capital to share holders. What capital? Where from?

Both the 2001 and 2009 schemes cost policyholders a huge amount of money. MSE had barely got started in 2001 so Which? magazine were the champions who smelled a rat and tried to stop AXA. But at the time the 2009 Aviva scheme was being touted, at least one of the regular MSE pension adviser crew actually encouraged policyholders to sell their rights to further investment returns for a pittance (probably unwittingly - clueless as to what was really going on).

You are effectively doing the same clueless bit, bowlhead99 if you rate yourself as a pensions adviser of any ilk. Did you ever see the enormous documents sent by AXA to Policyholders around 2001, and the even bigger documents sent by Aviva to policyholders over a two year period up to 2009? Have you ever analysed how the communication of updates of the performance of our AXA and Aviva WP pensions changed enormously post those schemes - how they became scarce, over thin on data, non-regular, and more and more opaque? I don't think you could have done else you wouldn't be responding the way you are.

This latest has all the hallmarks of exactly the same sort of heist, except this time, they are attempting to strenuously avoid calling any part of it a reattribution. If they did, that'd mean they'd need a Policyholder Advocate again, and this time, they wouldn't get away with pulling the wool.

The words of the new background reports offered to policyholders on the Friends Life website, but seemingly only to advisers on the Aviva website, is mealy-mouthed. The truth of the intention of the proposed scheme lies between the thousands of lines, not in them.

I think my current Aviva UKLAP (Aviva Life & Pensions UK Limited) WP Sub-Fund is proposed to be designated a "Closed Fund", (and maybe even UKLAP itself?) yet my Sub Fund (OWPSF) ontains at least £800,000,000, plus bits of it I think ended up supposedly "ring-fenced" by previous schemes and placed outside of it in other sub-fund containers within UKLAP. I think I'm reading that all previous "Schemes" affecting UKLAP WP including the 2009 Reattribution Scheme are being voided.

Now hear this:

The 2009 Reattribution Scheme currently results in me receiving a 9% higher transfer value than any of the 88.25% of CGNU/CULAC policyholders who accepted the paltry bribe in 2009. That's over five grand. On 2 October 2017 if I request a new Transfer Value, will it be the same as on 30 September 2017 i.e. 9% higher than the majority of policyholders who got tipped into the New With Profits Sub Fund??

And hear this too:
In 2001 I declined a less than £400 bribe from AXA and effectively said up yours to the 2001 Reattribution Scheme. That scheme has so far resulted in me receiving some seven grand more in attached bonuses than I would have if I had accepted the bribe. They add something every 5 years at a review defined by the 2001 Scheme. If that Scheme is voided too, do my special distribution bonuses on that one get knocked on the head also?

That's just two examples of my reasonable policyholder expectation being tossed carelessly to the wind by Aviva.

I think the first thing the High Court should do is to toss the so called Independent Expert's Report to the wind, and take all actuarial opinion, especially from Aviva themselves, with a healthy pinch of salt.

So this proposed "2017 Scheme" needs serious collective opposition, and the only credible opposition in the current day is a Martin Lewis led MSE.