Sunday, October 11, 2009

Gone are the days of trust when an Englisman's word was his bond.

I reproduce hereunder the words of a dispossessed Kaupthing depositor which sums up well the feelings of expats everywhere whose trust in the Isle of Man has been not only betrayed but ridiculed as though that were not a valid basis for putting one's life savings on deposit in a bank on the Isle of Man.

"No matter where you save (not invest) your money, be it offshore in the British Islands, or even in Timbuktu, permission is not given for others to purloin, take, squander or steal your hard-earned money - and that applies whether you are an immigrant or an expat.....

When you have been expatriate for many years and have built a long-term rapport with your bank or building society, it is not felt necessary to continually check up on them, similarly, when that reputable building society [the Derbyshore] tells you that they are moving the business on to another reputable company and they strongly recommend that you give that company [KSFIoM] your continued support, there are many of us from an era when an Englishman's word was true and we would not believe other than things were being said honestly for the benefit of all involved.

That type of thinking seems incredibly naive and foolish now, especially when after 16 years of dedicated saving, my £397,000 has disappeared into another bank in the UK [that went bust] and I will be lucky to see even 1/2 of it back - and then it will be too late.

So you see, there are people out there like us who just moved temporarily overseas because they chased jobs or adventure, that worked hard, but were not that financially astute. Had we been, we'd have probably been a lot more adventurous with our money then just saving it in a boring bank - but we're that sort of people I think: those that don't risk their life-savings in anything dodgy, but really believed that putting it in a bank was the safest thing to do. Now we've been proven to be inadequate fools, and people have taken advantage of our situation of being spread all around the globe with no representation; no vote; and no power to do anything other than appeal through the press.

Doing that of course brings the risk of others having a dig and a bash at us - and maybe we deserve to be labelled as foolish - but we didn't act maliciously towards others, nor take them to task for being inadequate in one part of their lives; we merely expected that those persons charged with looking after the finances of their country was to properly do the job they get so highly paid for and look after the interests of those who are not so clever in this department. They didn't do their job, they let us down and they let their country down, they all turned a blind eye until it was too late, now the unsophisticated expat depositors - working or retired - carry this huge loss."

1 comment:

  1. Superbly put. That really sums it all up.

    We were sold out by The Derbyshire (a good old British Building Society in which we had put our trust) who redirected expatriates - and even encouraged UK residents - to their offshore subsidiary and then sold it to a dodgy Icelandic bank without so much as a by your leave. Those to whom the Derbyshire had sold fixed term bonds were unable to withdraw their money - those who tried to do so were refused. Mind you, they didn't say it was an Icelandic bank - that fact was cleverly disguised by calling it a northern European bank with branches in .... a list of countries with Iceland buried somewhere in the middle. Why would they do that if they didn't already know that Iceland was in trouble and they were selling us a pig in a poke?

    Don't bank on the Isle of Man and ...
    DON'T TRUST THE DERBYSHIRE

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