Mis-sold or mis-told

seanie1965

Following advice from this site, I submitted a complaint to Zurich Life Assurance about an endowment that I had been sold by Allied Dunbar (later taken over by Zurich) in 1990. Zurich has responded saying that they had written to me in April 2001 advising that the endowment was under-performing and then again in May 2003, May 2004 and May 2005. They are saying that as they made initial contact before the new FSA regulations on complaints came into force the time limits do not apply in my case.

However, I note in the article on this site that "If your endowment was mis-sold, this means not just that it did under perform, but you weren’t told it may under perform or were incorrectly advised" adding that "When you signed up, you should have been told that, as performance is linked to risk, your endowment may not grow big enough to pay off your mortgage. In a nutshell, you’re complaining about the way you were sold – not the performance of your policy." I would therefore conclude that the fact that Zurich or AD may have written to me about the performance of the policy in 2001 does not mean that the time limits apply from that point. The alarm bells really started ringing for me when the communication was received in May 2005 and the front of the letter had a big red section on the front saying that my policy was in danger of not paying out and then reading the projections, it looks as though the policy will only pay around half the amount originally projected. This made me think back to the original sale when the sales person from AD stated that AD would write to me after about 17 years and the chances are there would be sufficient funds to pay off the mortgage 8 years early and wouldn't that be great! Yes it would, but here we are 16 years later looking at a policy that is unlikely to pay out half the mortgage amount!

Do I have grounds to complain based on the belief that the time limit starts when I first become aware that the policy was mis-sold, i.e. when it seems likely that the guy who sold it was talking nonsense when he projected it would have sufficient funds after 17 years, and not 3 years from when Zurich told me the fund was not likely to be enough?

Also, does the fact that Zurich contacted me in 2001 and asked me to confirm what arrangements I would be making to cover any shortfall bear any relevance? At that point, I had switched to a repayment mortgage, so effectively was making my own arrangements to sort out the shortfall.

Thanks

EdInvestor

The "time bar" for making a complaint starts from the time when you receve a letter from the endowment company that there is a "high risk" that it will not pay off the mortgage. The letter needs to use that language, "high risk".

You have three years to complain from that point.

More recently the regulator has said that the letter must also contain a warning about the time limit for making the complaint ( ie you can't get timebarred if you don't know there is such a thing as a time bar).