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Tags: agreement, application, authority, bank, barclays, british, cancelled, charges, cheque, cheques, citizens, compensation, conditions, crisis, customers, document, documents, expenses, finance, financial, financial ombudsman, fraud, garage, government, guardian, help, insurance, insurer, landlord, legal, locking, manager, money, nationwide, november, ombudsman, rental, repair, securities, settlement -
Your problems: Margaret Dibben writes your wrongs
NU wrote off my car. Then they decided they'd try to repair it ...
My Mazda MX-5 was stolen last November. It was found shortly before Christmas, after being involved in a high-speed police chase, and was severely damaged. Two days earlier I had been offered a settlement figure by Norwich Union (NU) but, because the insurance was in my wife's name and she was working abroad at the time, NU had to wait for her to agree the amount.
Instead, as the car had now been found, NU undertook to have it repaired. Several months later, it was returned in an unsatisfactory condition and, after discussion with NU, was returned to the garage where more work was carried out. When it was again returned, it would not start and had to sit on the road. I paid for it to be towed to another garage and paid separately for a new alternator, battery and door locking system.
At the end of May, NU agreed to further repairs as it was still unsafe to drive. Currently the car is in a Mazda garage which has been waiting four weeks to hear from NU. The complaints manager there no longer returns our calls. Approaching the anniversary of the theft, I still have no car and have been paying premiums for a car I have not been able to drive.
JM, London
Margaret: What a trail of incompetence. Complaints managers should have a fail-safe system and refer complaints higher up if they feel they can't cope. They can always send you a 'deadlock letter', which means they have investigated as far as they can go and allows you to take your problem to the Financial Ombudsman Service. They should never simply ignore you.
Norwich Union has now shown your problem to its in-house engineer. He immediately concluded that no one should ever have authorised repairs to your car in the first place. It was clearly a write-off and you should have been paid for it immediately. The insurer says it understands how frustrating the past year has been for you - having to keep returning the car to the garage and provide yourself with another vehicle to drive. It has now come to an agreement. It is giving you £9,500 for the car, which is the write-off value at the time it was stolen and which you have accepted. It is adding £160 for the road tax you've had to pay, £100 towards taxis and other out-of-pocket expenses and £500 compensation for making such a mess of your claim.
Apparently, my wife isn't good enough for my bank
My wife and I have spent half the year in Sandwich, Kent, for the past five years, always staying at the same rental unit. Our main residence is in the US and we are retired US citizens. I have had a Nationwide FlexAccount since 2003 and never been overdrawn. In August, we asked our local Nationwide branch to add my wife to my FlexAccount. She proved her identity using her US passport and her address with a letter from the landlord's agent. This satisfied the branch, which sent the paperwork to head office.
But Nationwide has refused to add my wife to the account as she is not registered on the voters' roll in Sandwich. This is its final decision.
RW, Sandwich
Margaret: When you opened your accounts, Nationwide allowed non-UK nationals to become customers but it has since changed this rule, as have other banks. It has looked at your wife's application again and this time agreed that indeed she can become a joint account holder with you. That is the only logical decision it could reach.
Why can't National Grid just post my dividends to me?
Capita Tracing Solutions wrote to tell me I had £282 in unclaimed dividends from National Grid but that I must pay 15 per cent, £42, before it will forward the difference to me. I fail to understand why National Grid has not sent me this amount in full since I have lived at my present address for 12 years.
BMcD, Sunderland
Margaret: National Grid has more than one million shareholders and says it cannot economically check that every dividend cheque has been cashed. So it employs Capita to find missing shareholders, something that few companies with large shareholder lists do. But you do not have to use Capita. You can contact National Grid directly for the money.
The mystery is why you didn't receive the dividends in the first place. National Grid has found four outstanding dividend cheques and another five from its predecessor, BG plc. It reissues uncashed cheques worth under £30 free but charges £12 for cheques over £30 and £15 for any over £100, even though it takes no extra effort to rewrite a large cheque than a small one.
All but two of your cheques are under £30. One is over £30 and the other over £100, which means you have to pay £27 to get the dividends. National Grid has checked that it was writing to your correct address, so will not waive the fee, but at least it is cheaper than paying £42 to Capita.
Barclays can't explain why I've paid out £141
I told Barclays Bank that there was a £141 standing order in my account for Eagle Securities, a firm with whom I had never had any contact. I asked to see the original form setting up the standing order but the bank has no such document in its files. Apparently 15 months is too long for the bank to keep the document.
Barclays suggests I take this up with the Financial Ombudsman Service, but if my bank of 55 years cannot prove that it had proper authority to make payments totalling £705 from my account, it should refund the money and take it up with the beneficiary of this standing order.
SA, Leicester
Margaret: Barclays promptly cancelled the standing order and refunded £705. It keeps standing order instructions for only 13 months as it believes this is long enough for any queries to arise. Rather than fraud, the bank believes that either the person setting up the standing order gave your account number by mistake or someone in the bank wrote it down wrongly.
• Email Margaret Dibben at money.writes@observer.co.uk or write to Margaret Dibben, Money Writes, The Observer, 3-7 Herbal Hill, London EC1R 5EJ and include a telephone number. Do not enclose SAEs or original documents. Letters are selected for publication and we cannot give personal replies. The newspaper accepts no legal responsibility for advice.
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A with-profits windfall that's still up in the air
If you are a Norwich Union (NU) with-profits policyholder who has resisted the temptation to cash in on the prospect of a windfall as the insurer distributes its inherited estate, then you've had two bits of bad news.
First Philip Scott, finance director of NU's parent Aviva, warned last week that collapsing stock markets meant there was a risk that the terms of the distribution could change - and you can bet any amendment would not be in policyholders' favour. Then, as I predicted last week, NU imposed swingeing penalties on anyone cashing in their policies by imposing a market value adjustment, reducing the value of the fund by between 13 and 22 per cent, depending on its vintage. That is a significant deterrent for anyone who has lost patience with the reattribution process - or who simply needs the money or is about to retire.
The markets have certainly been turbulent since Norwich Union announced it had reached an agreement with the advocate acting on behalf of its policyholders, Clare Spottiswoode, to hand out £1bn of assets not fully distributed to generations of its policyholders. The FTSE 100 has fallen by about a quarter, some parts of the corporate bond market have fallen much further and property values are down by around 5 per cent.
But Dominic Lindley, principal policy adviser for financial services at Which? - who has been critical of NU's handling of the negotiation - questions whether it would now be seeking to renegotiate if prices had been going the other way. And he points out that Aviva's directors have been claiming that their hedging strategies have protected the value of all its funds from the ravages of the market.
Perhaps a more pertinent reason for Scott's warning is that investors are starting to worry that financial turmoil, which has already devastated the banks, is spreading to the insurance industry. Aviva's share price fell sharply last week on fears that it could be forced to raise capital through a rights issue. While Scott categorically ruled this out, some investors may be wondering why it is giving away £1bn of precious resources to policyholders who were hardly clamouring for it in the first place.
Insurers are generally in better shape than banks both because of tighter regulation on their capital reserves, imposed following the 2001 stock market crash, and because they are less vulnerable to a wave of panicky withdrawals. But the Financial Services Authority has been closely monitoring the impact of a sharp fall in corporate bonds - which now account for more of insurers' investments than equities do.
The agreement between Spottiswoode and NU was announced at the end of July but it still has to be approved by the courts and voted on by policyholders, so there is plenty of time for markets to settle - or, of course, to get even worse. NU cannot arbitrarily decide to reduce the payment; the whole deal would have to be renegotiated. And Aviva might be reluctant to endure the bad press that any change to the terms would get.
Lindley says this is simply the 'latest in a long line of broken promises' by Aviva. Which? has already complained that the distribution of a £2.1bn surplus uncovered as part of the reattribution negotiations is being paid over three years, rather than all at once. That meant those whose policies matured or were cashed in during the three-year period lost out.
With-profits policies were marketed as safer ways of saving because they smoothed out the volatility of the stock market to offer more predictable growth. Market value adjustments, long lock-ins and on-off reattributions merely underline how wrong that perception is.
Rising stock markets can make the most mediocre fund manager look like a star, but bear markets, like the one we are currently suffering, are real tests of their skills. Judging by some research carried out by fund manager T Bailey, far too many are found wanting.
It has looked at the number of managers of UK funds who have come in the top quartile in both rising and falling markets since 1999, just before the technology crash gave birth to the 2000 bear market. The results are alarming: just five of the 160 funds in the UK All Companies sector were in the top quartile in the bear market that lasted until March 2003, the bull market that followed, and the current bear market that started last July. They are Blackrock UK Special Situations, CF Walker Crips UK Growth, Fidelity Special Situations, M&G Recovery and Marlborough UK Leading Companies. In the popular UK equity income sector, the results are just as bad: just three funds out of 59 - Invesco Perpetual Income, Invesco Perpetual High Income and St James Place UK High Income - managed that feat; all three are run by Neil Woodford.
Elliot Farley, senior analyst at T Bailey, says: 'The chances of an investor picking a fund that will perform in both bull and bear markets through the next decade are low. It means an investor needs to monitor his fund portfolio constantly.'
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Lisa Bachelor: It's not perfect - but this new code could say homeowners
Some good news at last for struggling homeowners? It seemed so from the headlines last week. The government announced a new set of rules - a 'pre-action protocol' - designed to tackle the growing number of repossessions, which, if they work, will make it hard for lenders to take borrowers who are in difficulties straight to court, as many do now.
Lenders taking a defaulting borrower to court will now be 'expected' by judges to be able to show they have sought alternatives to repossession and acted fairly. Options for discussion between parties include extending the term of a mortgage, changing the type of mortgage and deferring payments.
The protocol ticks all the right boxes and includes many things we were pushing for in Cash last week. But it is not surprising that lenders have come out en masse to back it: for them, things could have been a lot worse.
The pre-action protocol was being consulted on and would have taken many more months to come to fruition. Insiders say that the rising levels of repossessions - not least from nationalised bank Northern Rock - persuaded the government to push this code of practice through quickly. While this is a good thing, it means that the published code is considerably more lenient on lenders than the draft version, and there is a worry among debt charities - who also largely welcome it - that it could still be ignored. Crucially, it does not explain what sanctions lenders will suffer if they fail to negotiate with borrowers first.
It is also lacking in detail - for example, on how lenient a lender should be, and for how long, if a borrower has lost their job and is waiting for their unemployment insurance to kick in. And let's not forget that it is a code rather than a law: neither the lenders nor the judiciary have to follow it.
However, although the code is less that perfect, this should not take away from the fact that it is a move in the right direction. It came in the same week that the Council of Mortgage Lenders published excellent and very comprehensive guidelines on how its members should deal with those who fall behind on their mortgage payments. Although borrowers should be under no illusion that these codes and guidelines will stop repossessions, collectively they send out a strong message to lenders - and make it much harder for them to take away your home if you run into trouble.
l.bachelor@observer.co.uk
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Borrowers beware as tracker rates soar skyward - or disappear altogether
Mortgage lenders have almost doubled some of the margins on their tracker rates in the past week, while others have pulled out of the market altogether.
Last Monday HSBC, which had some of the most competitive tracker rates available, repriced its deals. Anyone with less than 25 per cent equity in their home and a £150,000 loan who wants to remortgage with HSBC will now pay £70 more per month than they would have done had they remortgaged the week before.
The rate on HSBC's lifetime tracker is now 1.69 percentage points above the Bank of England base rate, giving it a pay rate of 6.19 per cent for anyone with a loan-to-value (LTV) of between 75 and 95 per cent. This was 0.94 of a point above base rate the previous week. The fee has also been increased, from £499 to £599.
Nationwide also increased its tracker margins last week by as much as 0.6 of a percentage point, wiping out any benefit new borrowers would have got from the half-point cut in base rate. On its lifetime tracker deal, new borrowers with less than 25 per cent to put down will pay a margin of 2.03 points above base rate, a rise on the previous margin of 1.43 points.
This follows moves by other lenders, such as the Woolwich, which has also increased its tracker rates, and Cheltenham & Gloucester, which has withdrawn trackers for anyone with less than a 40 per cent deposit or the equivalent equity.
None of these moves will affect existing tracker mortgage holders, who will see their mortgage repayments fall by half a point after the Bank of England rate cut.
Alliance & Leicester, meanwhile, pulled all its tracker deals from the market and has not said when, if ever, it will replace them. The Yorkshire building society made a similar move on 7 October and has still not replaced them. 'It is possible more lenders will take a breather while they work out what to do next,' says David Hollingworth of mortgage brokers London & Country.
Some discount rates - those that give a reduction on a lender's standard variable rate (SVR) - now look good value. An HSBC tracker mortgage, for example, for anyone with a 60 per cent LTV, is at 5.69 per cent with a £599 fee. The lender's discount rate for the same borrower is 5.29 per cent - the HSBC variable rate, less 0.96 of a point for the first two years.
But Hollingworth urges borrowers to be cautious. 'Just because the discount looks cheaper now, you can't bank on it staying that way,' he says. 'HSBC has already said it won't be reducing its SVR in line with the base rate, whereas if you are on a tracker your rate has to mirror the base rate.'
For those who do want a tracker, Hollingworth recommends a 4.99 per cent two-year tracker from C&G, which comes with a fee of 2.5 per cent of the mortgage: 'The rate is so good it's worth considering.' For those with a 90 per cent LTV, he recommends First Direct's lifetime tracker, which tracks at 0.99 of a point over base and has a £399 fee.
Melanie Bien of Savills Private Finance says the rate rises are 'disappointing', but that a tracker is still the best option for those who don't need the security of a fix, with economists expecting rates to fall as low as 2 per cent. However, she urges borrowers to read the small print. 'Some trackers, such as those from Halifax and Nationwide, have a collar,' she says. 'This means if base rate goes below a certain level - 3 per cent with Halifax or 2.75 per cent with Nationwide - the full rate cut is not passed on. Lenders such as Abbey don't have collars on their new deals, so you won't be penalised if interest rates fall.'
Ray Boulger of mortgage brokers John Charcol says it is no surprise that lenders are pulling out or repricing deals, as the three-month Libor (London interbank offered rate) has not fallen in line with the base rate. He adds that the spread between the two rates looks set to widen as the base rate falls. 'We are going to see tracker margins go up and fewer trackers to choose from,' he says.
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Struggling vendors bow to the crunch and cut their prices
Sellers who had been refusing to reduce the asking prices of their properties are starting to resign themselves to losses of as much as 20 per cent, say estate agents.
Figures from HM Revenue & Customs out last week show that the number of homes changing hands fell by 53 per cent over the previous 12 months, a figure suggesting that the government's raising of the stamp duty threshold to £175,000, announced in the first week of September, has failed to kick-start the market.
'It's simply not worth selling unless you drop the price by at least 15 per cent - and that will make a difference,' says Charles Peerless, director of Winkworth West End and Clerkenwell in central London. He recently advised the vendor of a two-bedroom apartment in Clerkenwell to cut their asking price from £575,000 to £495,000. 'It can be very hard for people to accept that they have to reduce their asking price, but in most cases they understand that they now have to do it.'
In Ware, Hertfordshire, the owners of a three-bedroom townhouse cut the asking price from £275,000 to £250,000 and the house sold a week later. Daniel Carter of estate agents Jonathan Hunt, who sold the property, says: 'If the owners of this house hadn't dropped the price, it would still have been on the market today.'
According to Carter, sales that have gone through recently have done so solely because sellers dropped their asking prices: 'There's little sellers can do to push a sale through now other than be at tomorrow's price today.'
In some instances, sellers who do not reduce their asking price still end up accepting much lower offers than they anticipated - Carter says he recently sold a property for £375,000 even though it was on the market for £415,000. 'It got to the point that it had been on the market since May and hadn't had any offers, and although there were other buyers interested in the property, none were in a position to proceed, so they had to go with the buyers that were.'
Sellers who rejected offers earlier in the year because they didn't seem high enough may now be regretting their decision. The vendor of a two-bedroom apartment near Andover, Hampshire, rejected an offer of £300,000 in May. The property is valued at £275,000 and initially had an asking price of £325,000 - but this has since been cut to £295,000.
David Smith, senior partner at estate agent Dreweatt Neate, which is selling the Andover apartment, says: 'It's a significant price drop. With hindsight, it may have been better to have accepted that first offer. But at the end of the day, if something's worth £300,000 and you're asking £350,000, it's still too much.'
Elsewhere, sellers with empty properties are in a hurry to shift them in order to avoid potentially high maintenance costs over the winter, such as heating problems or frozen pipework. 'Some sellers have told us that they'll take a lower offer - even lower than the value we have given the property - just so they don't need to heat it or insure it during the winter,' says Smith.
'At the end of the day, if you have £200,000 in the bank today from the sale of a property, then at least your money is still worth something, against the uncertainty of how things might be six months down the line.'
While agents and property experts agree that there is still demand for family properties - first-time buyer properties are the least likely to sell - the number of buyers who have a mortgage lined up and are able to follow through with a sale is small.
'A buyer who has secured lending and is ready to proceed with the sale quickly is very rare these days, and once a seller finds a buyer like that, you basically have to do whatever they want - including bringing the price down,' says Smith.
But not every seller is prepared to do this. One Observer reader, who asked not to be named, put her two-bedroom maisonette in Kensington, west London, on the market for £365,000 in August. Her estate agent advised her to drop the asking price to £320,000, but she has been reluctant to do so and has had only four viewings since August.
'We'd probably have had more viewings if we had dropped the asking price, but we know the flat is worth more than £320,000 and don't want to put the asking price down if we could potentially get the full amount when things have improved in the market,' she says. 'We're happy to wait it out for the next six to eight months.'
Other vendors, such as Sheila Gaunt from Buckinghamshire, are becoming resigned to not finding a buyer at all. Ms Gaunt, 58, put her three-bedroom cottage in Marlow on the market last month for £750,000. She has had three viewings, but doesn't expect the property to sell soon. 'I know that the likelihood of the cottage selling is really remote, particularly because of the way things are at the moment with the credit crunch, but I'm in a position whereby I have to sell right now,' she says.
'I would be willing to lower the sale price but, then again, it is priced in line with the cost of other cottages on my road. When I first decided to put it on the market, the different local estate agents were vying to be the ones to sell it. But in the last two to three weeks it's been really quiet and there's been no interest in my house at all.'
h.qureshi@observer.co.uk
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Big firms, big rates - but are the overseas banks safe?
As ING gets government cash, savers remain jittery about money in 'foreign' accounts. By Sam Dunn
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Pension buyout start-ups retire from the market
Companies seeking to offload expensive final salary pension schemes may be the latest victims of the credit crunch. Activity in the burgeoning pensions buyout market has all but dried up since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and experts have doubts over whether it will revive when stock and bond markets start to recover.
Richard Jones, principal at pension advisers Punter Southall, warned months ago it was unlikely that buyouts by insurance companies would top £8bn this year, far below the £12bn-£15bn most other commentators predicted. With the current total stuck at £6.3bn so far, his view could actually prove over-optimistic.
Others are now falling into line with that forecast. Paul Belok, principal and actuary at Aon Consulting, says: 'There is a major risk that the momentum that has been built up in the buyout market in recent quarters is in serious danger of being lost.' He expects 'a slowdown in the spectacular growth we have witnessed in the last year, although in the longer term we expect the market to remain buoyant'.
He points out that company pension funds are worth more than £1 trillion, meaning buyouts so far represent only a tiny proportion of the total. 'Even if just 25 per cent of the market goes into the insurance sector in the next few years, it will represent a huge business.'
Again, however, Jones is unsure: he thinks it is highly unlikely that the rapid growth in the market predicted by much of the industry will materialise.
He believes that the increase in deals was in effect being driven by bargain-basement pricing that is no longer tenable. Companies such as Paternoster, set up by Mark Wood three years ago to take advantage of what was expected to be a fast-growing buyout market, were offering discounts of as much as 10 per cent to pension fund trustees to persuade them to transfer the schemes. Wood was taking the lion's share of business - in 2007, Paternoster accounted for almost half the £2.9bn of buyout deals done, and it has completed a further £1.1bn worth in the first nine months of this year.
But the financial crisis, which has rocked share and bond markets, means such discount pricing is no longer feasible. Aon says that insurers have become 'more nervous' and have 'ceased providing guarantees on the assumptions underlying their quotations'.
It adds: 'A number have started pricing more conservatively than previously, and a higher charge is being imposed for paying in cash or other assets that the insurer does not want to hold. The impact has been that a number of deals that were close to transacting have seen the goalposts move over the past few weeks, with some insurers unwilling or unable to transact in the short term.'
One of the key issues undermining the buyout market is the same as that affecting the share prices of quoted insurance companies such as Aviva and Prudential, which have plunged more than 40 per cent in the past month: the availability of capital.
When a pension fund is bought out by an insurance company, the trustees buy an annuity from the insurer which guarantees the payment of the contracted level of pensions to all its members. The company, in turn, invests the assets of the fund in bonds aimed at providing a high enough return to cover that guarantee.
While bonds have traditionally been more secure investments than equities, the financial crisis and risk of a severe global recession have sent their prices plunging. Some sections of the bond market are down by more than 40 per cent over the past month or so as investors fret that defaults are going to rise sharply. All of Paternoster's assets - and a large proportion of those at Aviva and the Pru - are in these bonds, and investors have started to wonder whether the plunge in their prices means they will need to raise new capital.
Both Aviva and Prudential have ruled out a rights issue and Paternoster's Wood is sanguine. He says that Paternoster will hold its bonds until they mature and that most have very long durations and high credit ratings - more than 80 per cent are rated A or above. Defaults on the portfolio have been running at less than 0.2 per cent. But the financial crisis has meant ratings are no longer that good a guide to default risk; Lehman's bonds were rated as AAA, yet most will see only a very small return.
Wood also insists Paternoster has plenty of capital: the £500m raised when it launched was enough to fund about £6.5bn of deals and it has so far completed only around £3bn worth.
But one consultant believes that the discounts on some of the earlier deals means Paternoster will have had to have set aside more of its capital to support those buyouts, while it has also taken longer than anticipated to get the buyout market up and running, which means Paternoster has had to devote more time to its launch phase.
Edmund Truell of Pension Corporation, a new potential buyer in the market, says there has been a significant withdrawal of capital in the past four months, with banks such as Citigroup and Lehman pulling out. 'Pressure on other insurers is significant because of their holdings of equities,' he adds.
He does not expect much of that capital to return. Legal & General and Prudential, which traditionally shared the pensions buyout market, are likely to remain active, along with 'one or two' players operating at the edge. Pension Corporation raised £1bn at launch and, says Truell, that makes it one of the best capitalised companies.
Aon says trustees are also becoming more cautious following the collapse of AIG, one of the world's largest insurers: 'Questions regarding the covenant provided by insurers are very much to the fore in light of the failures seen in the financial sector, albeit that the regulatory protection in place for life insurers provides significant comfort.'
For pensioners, an insolvent insurance company could be a better bet than a pension fund run by a bankrupt corporation. While the FSA guarantees payment of insurers' benefits, corporate pension schemes are dealt with by the Pension Protection Fund - and that only covers 90 per cent of the promised payout, up to just less under £27,000.
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Fifth of money market funds perform badly
More than a fifth of the money market funds available to retail investors, promoted as a safe alternative to cash, have lost money over the last three months - and experts warn there could be further pain to come.
The worst performer is the Threadneedle UK Money Securities Fund, which has lost almost 5 per cent over the last three months, according to figures from Morningstar. Two funds offered by Prudential, a further two from F&C and one from M&G have also lost between 0.1 and 2 per cent.
These are some of the new breed of 'cash plus funds', which aimed to offer a small premium above the rates from cash deposits by investing in areas such as asset-backed securities - credit cards, mortgages and other loans which are parcelled up and sold to investors - and certificates of deposit. Their value has plunged since the financial crisis took hold and there could be further falls.
Threadneedle's fund, for example, has a third of its assets in asset-backed floating-rate notes. A spokesman said that these had started to recover after the various government bail-outs of banks, but 'the deteriorating economic background which has affected all markets has impacted the recovery, which in turn has affected the fund's recent performance'.
F&C's Sterling Enhanced Cash fund - which has lost 1 per cent in the last month alone - is almost 50 per cent invested in asset-backed securities. It changed its pricing basis in the summer, following a dramatic drop in its value, compensating some investors who had lost out, but its performance remains poor.
Tony Andrews, manager of the Henderson Cash fund - which has made 1.13 per cent in the last month - said: 'The rational investor has to be confident with the portfolio they are buying. For certain types of asset, questions need to be asked.' His fund has never invested in asset-backed securities and other riskier instruments.
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Arev's soap opera cliffhanger
Icelandic investment company Arev may be trapped in a soap opera of its own making. Its founders are thought to have named the company and its private equity arm, Kcaj, after famous Coronation Street couple Jack and Vera Duckworth. Kcaj and Arev are Jack and Vera spelt backwards and although the Corrie link has been denied in the past, the plot thickened when Arev bought leather goods brand Aspinal of London and called the new company Yerrt - presumably after the Duckworths' wayward son, Terry. But the collapse of the Icelandic banking system has presented Arev with more tension that your average episode of Corrie as its ultimate backer, Milestone, is thought to want out.
This year a string of investments have soured for Arev - it owned a minority stake in collapsed couturier Hardy Amies while another interest, fashion brand Ghost, has warned of the same fate. Maternity retailer Blooming Marvellous, which it bought last year, is thought to require more funds. Some management teams, including Aspinal of London founder Iain Burton, are understood to be preparing buyouts.
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Horrified Darling knew Icelandic banks were in trouble, secret tape reveals
Alistair Darling was alerted to the possibility of a meltdown of Icelandic banks 'weeks' before they collapsed, taking billions of pounds of British savers' cash invested in them.
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