Thanks SJG1974 for your reply and stating your belief that Frank has not done anything wrongful. I have had some difficulty understanding your position on this matter from the content of your posts.
As you may or may not be aware my colleagues and I keep a close eye on the court lists and we have never noticed Frank being mentioned.
S
Not a problem Solly. Always happy to clarify my position.
And I have stated several times that I am not putting Frank or any Storm victim "on the stand" as it were.
And I am not bracketing all storm clients as greedy, money hungry morons. I am sure that some of the 4,000 clients probably were, but again, how would we know? And I am certainly not saying that the banks are an innocent party in all this....far from it. But it would be nice to have some balance around here.
Simply put, there is more to this whole saga than what the banks did and didn't do. Much more. There are more factors behind why people lost so much money in this mess than simply what the banks did and didn't do. However, it seems that those posters who were with Storm have chosen to focus purely on this aspect.
Some are happy to accuse the banks of wrongdoing, of the banks and storm for telling fibs, to did and dig to find the "truth". Yet when other aspects are raised, such as the why they invested in the first place, or when they are challenged to back up and explain statements they have made, they clam up.
They are happy to discredit statements made by say Ralph Norris that he didn't undrstand what was going on, or a statement by Manny Cassimatis that they ensured Stormers were fully educated before they took them on as clients, or the statement that 3 in 4 people walked away, yet we are all expected to blindly believe them when they themselves say they did not have any idea of the risks involved. Again, when people like Frank claim one thing and then contradict themselves a few posts later, it makes me question whether they know more than they are letting on....particularly when they are unwilling to answer questions about their motives.
I guess because Storm and the banks are the bad guys, we are free to discredit them and what they say, yet because the victims are innocent, we are expected to believe everything they say, despite there being no way to verify it, other than to ask them to explain further, which in most cases they don't do.
Questions have been asked and Stormers have not been able or prepared to answer them. I cant imagine the hurt of what they are going through, and I genuinely feel sorry for them. This whole mess should not have happened. But it did, like so many other messes before and in the future. But again, this forum is not a Storm support group, it is a place where we can look at all the issues...and at the moment the focus is mainly on one thing and one thing only....the banks. Focussing on the banks wont help prevent the next gullible 65 year old when he walks into a financial planners office, focussing on what that 65 year old should and shouldn't do will provide a better lesson.
Anyway, i trust that has clarified things.
On a separate issue, Solly with your legal knowledge, perhaps you can answer this:
If the UMIS case gets up, who pays the compensation? I am guessing that Storm and the CBA would be jointly to blame, yet Storm no longer exists, so is unable to pay damages. So would the CBA have to stump up Storm's half, or only their own, which would mean that clients would only receive half of what they are entitled to?