Iniquity
There is a company operating out of Birmingham (although their postal address is either Lancing or Worthing in West Sussex) which used to be called Lloyds TSB Registrars.
It got itself such a bad name that they changed it to Equiniti.
Their job is to impede share dealing. A few years ago I asked them to sell some shares my mother owned. They faffed around — to put it kindly — they hesitated, dawdled, asked for more and yet more forms and finally sold the shares 24 days after I’d given them the first instruction.
By which time the shares had lost ONE THIRD of their value.
This was for me a substantial sum, and I felt this amounted to dereliction of duty, so I took my case to the Financial Services Ombudsman, who rebuffed me by return of post.
I sent them copies of every single item of my correspondence, recordings of the increasingly agitated telephone calls I had been making daily to Equiniti, and eventually they condescended to look at my case.
But you know what? The Financial Services Ombudsman isn’t staffed by ordinary punters like you and I. It’s made up of timeservers who used to work at Equiniti, or whose best mates work there. Guess whose side they came down on?
Not an iota of blame was attached to Equiniti. The Financial Services Ombudsman thought it was perfectly reasonable for Equiniti to take 24 days to sell a single block of shares.
Recently I’ve had further dealings with Equiniti. I discovered that one company for which they are the registrars had not been paying dividends into a probate building society account.
So I sent them a letter. Just one little letter. I asked if Equiniti could look into this and refund the missing dividends.
They replied on Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And Friday. And so on.
They sent me thirty-one letters in reply to my single letter. Each letter contained a dividend cheque. Each letter contained the phrase “We have charged an administration fee of £11.75 (including VAT) to cover costs. The fee has been taken away from the attached payment.”
I worked that out as £364.25. Quite a hefty admin fee to answer one letter.
So I’ve written to them to ask for it back. I wonder what sort of reply I’ll get? And I wonder if the Financial Services Ombudsman will think it is perfectly reasonable to charge 31 times over for a single task? Silly me — they probably will.
If you do a Google search for Equiniti, the second hit to come up after their own corporate site is “How can I take Equiniti to the Small Claims Court?” Oh dear, that doesn’t look good, does it?
Where did this strange name come from? Maybe they couldn’t spell Iniquity? The people who run this extraordinary company ought to be doing something to restore its battered credibility. At the very least Sir Neville Simms, the Chairman, and his non-executive directors should be standing on the boardroom table bellowing in rage, to justify their emoluments.
