Capital & Income Solutions | Successful win of £85,000

Amount won: £ 85,000

Employer/Fund: Ethicon (Johnson & Johnson)

FA Firm: Capital & Income Solutions

Introduction:

After seeing an article on our website our client contacted us to investigate a claim for a mis-sold pension on behalf of her late husband.

He had been advised to transfer his Ethicon company pension and an Aviva Stakeholder pension into a Standard Life pension plan by Mike Connelly of The Mortgage Finance Store and Capital & Income Solutions.

The Background:

Her husband had previously worked for Ethicon for 18 years. He had a deferred defined benefit final salary pension with a value of £109,703.28 and a personal pension with a value of £9,881.51.

They had an interest only mortgage at the time and were looking to convert this to repayment and after searching on-line for a mortgage broker they contacted Mike Connelly.

He visited them at home and quickly established that her husband was 55 and asked about his past employment and pensions. Mike Connelly then advised that he should transfer both his pensions into a personal pension with Standard Life. He said that by doing this he would maximise his tax-free money and could be in a position to fully repay the mortgage early.

Our client and her husband were financially inexperienced and believed Mike Connelly was both fully qualified to give this advice and acting in their best interests.

The Consequences:

• Our client’s husband was not advised of the valuable benefits and guarantees he was giving up by transferring away from the Ethicon company pension.
• He no longer had an inflation proof pension and it was now subject to the volatility of the market.
• He faced a lifetime of fund and advisor charges with the real risk that his pension fund could run out.
• He was promised on-going advice as part of the 5% initial fee that he paid but he never heard from Mike Connelly again, nor was anyone from Capital & Income Solutions in touch.

Our client paid the following fees:

• Adviser fees of circa £5980
• Ongoing fund fees of 0.5%

Mike Connelly was not authorised or regulated to give pension transfer advice. He completely failed to mention the involvement of Capital & Income Solutions, the regulated company he used to sign off the pension transfer. Our client never spoke to a representative of that firm or received a suitability letter from them covering the pension transfer advice.

Capital & Income Solutions are now in liquidation.

The Settlement:

After obtaining the files from his previous and existing pension providers we determined that there was a claim. We submitted the claim with substantial evidence to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), as Capital & Income Solutions are now in liquidation.

The FSCS calculated the losses at £128,016.14.  

Since the FSCS have a limit to what they can pay out our client received the maximum compensation of £85,000 for the pension transfer advice that her late husband received.

This was paid directly into her bank account.