On the go: The Insolvency Service has handed lengthy bans to four company managers for a range of offences in relation to bad pension transfer advice.
Karl Dunlop, Stuart Grehan, Ian Dunsford and Stephen Talbot have accepted disqualification undertakings, which will ban them from acting as company directors for a combined total of 34 years.
The Insolvency Service’s investigation focused on directors linked with Transeuro Worldwide Holdings, who financially backed two introducer companies, Sycamore Crown and Jackson Francis.
The two introducers convinced members of the public, via cold-calling, to transfer their pots into self-invested personal pensions and pension schemes operated by Omni Trustees and Imperial Trustee Services.
Omni and Imperial provided trustee and administrator services for the Henley Retirement Benefit Scheme and the Capita Oak Pension Scheme.
Investigators found that over £39m was paid into Sipps, over £8m to HRBS and more than £10m into Cops.
Members’ funds were mostly invested in unregulated investments that failed to deliver the promised level of returns.
The introducer firms were found to have misled clients over their expertise. They offered guaranteed levels of returns that incentivised customers to agree to pension transfers.
Grehan, director of Sycamore Crown, received a nine-year ban for conducting false and misleading statements in order to encourage investors to transfer.
Dunlop, director of Imperial, and Dunsford, director of Omni, agreed to nine and seven-year bans respectively.
Both received disqualification undertakings for having failed to act in the best interests of their pension members and then failing to ensure that their investments were sufficiently diverse.
Imperial and Omni are currently the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Serious Fraud Office. Members of Cops and HRBS are being invited to participate.
Talbot, who was not a formal director at Transeuro Worldwide Holdings, accepted a nine-year disqualification undertaking for “failing to explain what happened to millions pounds worth of assets”, according to the Insolvency Service.
Disqualification undertakings prohibit recipients from being company directors, taking part in the formation of a company and being a receiver of a company's property.
In the view of Kate Smith, head of pensions at Aegon, these penalties are insufficient. “A ban from being involved in pension transfers is not a strong enough deterrent for other pension scammers,” she said.
“We need to see tougher penalties such as hefty monetary fines to make it clear that this behaviour will not be tolerated,” she added.
