Tan Kin Lian's Blog: Impact of an offer to settle

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Impact of an offer to settle

Dear Mr. Tan,
If there is a settlement, does it apply to everybody or only those who signed the Petition?

REPLY
If there is a proposal from the distributor, it will be offered to those who fit into a certain category (e.g. who have been misled into the investment). It is subject to acceptance by the offered party.

Some investors may not be offered the settlement, e.g. they were not misled, or may not accept the offer (e.g. it was too low).

The offer for a settlement will have no unrelated to the signing of the Petition. Any party offered can accept or rejected the offer, regardless of whether they sign the Petition.

So far, none of the financial institutions have responded to my suggestion for a mediation. So, this question is premature.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: We have to persist in asking for compensation, though my feeling is that the FIs will not going to give in easily.
I gave gone thru 2 rounds of teleconference with our "national" bank on HN2.
In the first round, they got 2 "experts" to address some of my questions but I was not satisfied and asked for someone considered "independent" to speak to me.
So in the 2nd round, a guy from the investor care centre rang me up but there was no difference. He was more interested in defending the bank than listening to my complaints. When I tried to debate on certain points, his response was "you are entitled to your views." So the attitude of the FI is obvious. However, he agreed to refer my complaints one step higher to their internal panel which "will investigate" my case and revert in about 21 days. If I am still not happy with the "verdict" from the internal panel, I can still go to Fidrec, according to the guy.
So u see, though MAS has appointed someone with integrity to ensure the process of handling complaints by the FIs is acceptable, nobody can really ensure that the FIs will handle our complaints in a fair and transparent manner unless an independent party like Fidrec is involved. The problem is many small investors may not be willing to go to Fidrec for various reasons. They may be illiterate, not able to read and write English, or not wish to get involved in legal matter etc.

I think apart from what Mr. Tan KL is trying very very hard to help, it boils down to whether the people with the power want to help the victims of the toxic bank products.; October 16, 2008 5:02 PM
Anonymous said...: What a " you are entitled to your views".
When designing HN2 in 2006, DBS was thinking "I bet now one can really understand the risk, except us, it should be sold as well as minibond, although our offer is even worse than monibond".

When sub-prime crisis started in 2007, DBS thouhgt "the outmost thing is to stop those people withdrawing from HN2. anyway, they do not know they are investing in sub-prime related CDOs". therefore, a letter is issued to assure HN2 is not related to sub-prime.

After pocketing about 30% return (my own guess), DBS noticed that they may lose their bet in the CDOs which they did not expect to go bust and therefore forgot to include it as credit events. Anyway, there is a vague hinting that the product is also exposed to the credit risk of constelaltion, how about trying to ask those people who are ignorant of finance and law to foot the bill when this happens..., therefore, a letter was sent about the impact of infficiency to secure their obligation.

TOO late, DBS. Should HN2 go bust, the investors are not only "entitled to their views", but to their actions.; October 17, 2008 9:44 AM