SVS Securities - shut down?

rugby7170

Does anybody know of anyone who has managed to get set up properly....and by that I mean has actually been able to trade ? 

flustered

@leonde Many thanks.  I see it now.  Sounds like their system is creaking.

Nbs222

Has gone down again

BSS

I have stil not received my login details. Is anyone else in this position?

Eastneuk

30,000 accounts to migrate and you all expect it to go smoothly? Personally I think we’re very lucky to be in the position we are in currently. It has only (and I mean only) taken 12 months to get to this stage with the cost of the Administrators being picked up by the FSCS. When the last stockbroker entered administration it took over 18 months to resolve (and that was pre Covid-19 days). I myself have only received notification on 1 out of 3 accounts (the emails are obviously not going out in Alphabetical order) but I’m happy to wait a few more days. What’s an extra 2 weeks delay when we’ve not had access to our stocks or dividends for 52 weeks. 

My2penneth

30k accounts to transfer? It's 20k.
The last big broker to fail was Beaufort Securities and most clients were back up and running with The Share Centre within 6 months - chronology given in the link to the FSCS website below. 

 Note,  there was fraud involved in the Beaufort Securities case just to make things even more complicated than SVS. 

https://www.fscs.org.uk/failed-firms/beaufort/

[Deleted User]

LC told me that in the Beaufort case the XO clients were split off from the others, and so could be reunited with their assets much more quickly. The other categories with Beaufort took much longer, and I'm not sure even if its all been resolved yet. LC didn't want to split us off from the other categories because they figured it might be very difficult to then find any solution for the others. I agree with Eastneuk above, we're luckily to be in the process of being reunited with our stuff, ITI didn't anticipate these technical hitches with their IT programs, and we just should be patient (and grateful) that the saga is coming to an end. Just a pity that the market seems to be on the verge of another meltdown and once again we're forced to be spectators!

FairDinkum

BSS said:

I have stil not received my login details. Is anyone else in this position?

I've received nothing except the email on Thursday saying there would be a delay. In their latest message today there is reference to those of us who have received nothing. Oddly they day that they "expected" us to receive the email within 48 hours. Why the past tense? This is the bit I refer to. " In addition, a small number of clients are yet to receive their initial onboarding emails. We expected this to be resolved over the course of the next 48 hours. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused."

[Deleted User]

On the fraud topic, is it true that SVS has been cleared of fraud? They seem to have been involved in some very dodgy sales of Carbon Credits alongside Deutsche Bank which was part of a major European fraud at the time, and it's possible that there is still an ongoing court case. I don't know the outcome, and SVS say they were innocent parties, but you might like to read this (the part SVS played comes in about halfway down):
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-05-07/how-major-banks-turned-a-blind-eye-to-the-theft-of-billions-of-pounds-of-public-money
I think that it's possible they ended up with a hefty fine for not doing due diligence, which maybe also brought them closer to the deeper attentions of the FCA.  
My understanding is that the FCA eventually stopped SVS from doing new business after finding that it had very questionable commission arrangements for promoting high-risk bonds to retail investors who didn't know what they were getting led into, and who certainly were not wanting to be taking such risks, and lastly SVS could also not explain how it valued illiquid assets. There are various articles out there on the web if you dig a little which show what they were doing with those investments. Here's an excerpt of one:
"But for three of its model portfolios, SVS chose an investment that eventually made up more than half the assets in each of them: Ireland-listed bonds issued by a company called Corporate Finance Bonds Ltd (CFBL).
Owned by a self-styled “insight architect”, CFBL had only two employees in its 2018 financial year, one of whom was the owner Stuart Anderson. CFBL’s bonds were designed to fund secured loans to small and medium-sized companies, but according to the FCA, SVS had little detail on what those loans were or even if they were to affiliates of CFBL.

Rather than cut the exposure of the model portfolios to the bonds after the FCA’s 2018 intervention, SVS instead increased it. Demetrios Christos Hadjigeorgiou, SVS’s boss, told the FCA he thought the bonds were some of the strongest performing parts of the model portfolios. The watchdog was not convinced. In official parlance, the FCA “does not consider this assessment to be supported by evidence. What the FCA did find was evidence of some racy fees, commissions and charges. Customers who did a pensions transfer or switch could find their investment pot depleted by more than a fifth in the process."

[Deleted User]

Another tidbit from the article above about SVS's somewhat dodgy dealings:

"On top of that there were the commissions SVS received from bond issuers: according to the FCA, it was 10 per cent from at least two of the issuers. Other investments in the model portfolio had SVS directors as shareholders or directors at the time an introduction was made or a decision to invest taken. To cap it all, there was a loan facility of £1m provided by a company controlled by Mr Anderson of CFBL to SVS, secured by a fixed and floating charge over SVS’s business that is still listed as outstanding".

This all comes from an article written by cat.rutterpooley@ft.com. I dunno if I'm allowed to re-print these excerpts...
Hope that I haven't bored everyone and gone too far off the track of what problems we're facing today...