SIPP company accused of “gagging” Ombudsman complaints

Carey Pensions has been accused of sending “threatening” letters to it’s clients in an effort to halt FOS decisions going public

If you’ve ever wondered whether you can read about upheld ombudsman complaints against financial firms and institutions, you can – just go to http://www.ombudsman-decisions.org.uk, but one SIPP provider – Carey Pensions, has been accused of trying to hide upheld complaints against it from the public eye, it is reported in Money Marketing.

Carey’s are known to have allowed people to transfer their pensions into their SIPPs to invest in high-risk investments, often after contact from sales agents through cold-calls, which is often the basis for mis-sold SIPP complaints when those investments are found to expose some clients to higher levels of risk than they can afford.

77 complaints against Carey Pensions

As reported in the same article, 77 complaints against Carey are “currently under consideration” with 24 provisional decisions already made – upheld AGAINST Carey, all insisting that Carey should have conducted more checks on the unregulated introducer that made the cold-calls to prospective clients, bringing them the business. In these cases, the FOS said that Carey should have known that the individual operating the cold-calling business was someone whom the FSA (forerunner to FCA) had published a warning note about. The predominant high-risk investments were store pods.

“Threatening letters”

Radio 4’s Your and Yours programme has since discovered that letters to over 12 clients from solicitors instructed by Carey Pensions asked them to withdraw from the Ombudsman process before the results were published and became publicly available.

In the program, the letters are described by a client as “long and threatening”, saying that the FOS decisions are incorrect, and instead offer the clients a smaller amount of compensation as a cash settlement in return for the client signing an NDA, a Non-Disclosure Agreement so less people could find out about the decisions.

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