GREEN PENSION TRUSTEES LIMITED Milwood House Albion Place Maidstone ME14 5DZ

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1 GREEN PENSION TRUSTEES LIMITED Milwood House Albion Place Maidstone ME14 5DZ «memname» «memaddress1» «memaddress2» «memaddress3» «memaddress4» «memaddress5» Dear «salutation» GREEN PENSION SCHEMES: RECOVERING YOUR MONEY «clientscheme2», MEMBERSHIP No. «client2ndref» 10 February 2017 We write further to our letter of 27 January 2017, and further to the various Member Updates and other updates issued via our website: By now, you should be aware of two problems with your pension: - The Green Schemes were set-up wrongly and badly run by the previous trustee Mr Mark Harris and his company AC Management & Administration Ltd ( ACMAL ). The schemes still require a lot of expensive administration work to rectify the past maladministration and to bring them back into compliance with pensions law. Some of your pension pot was invested in into a fraudulent scheme: the Para Sky Plantation in Brazil via GFI Consultants Ltd. This investment is now worthless. Your money has been lost. To rectify matters, we recommend that you do two (2) things: - Join our proposed action via the Pensions Ombudsman against Mr Mark Harris and ACMAL to recover some of the fees he took from the schemes and your pension pot. Allow us to introduce you to Financial Services Redress (UK) Ltd, a claims company run by experienced financial services lawyer Alasdair Sampson. This is to pursue a claim about the bad financial advice that you received about transferring your old pension arrangements to these schemes. These claims can be conducted on a competitive no win no fee basis. To start the process, please simply complete & sign the enclosed Response Form and return it in the pre-paid envelope. (Please use the PO Box 480, Sevenoaks TN13 9JY address as this is much quicker for us). Matters will take time to rectify. Success is not guaranteed. We believe however that these actions should in time allow for the bulk of your monies to be recovered, for the schemes to be safely wound up, and for whatever monies we can recover ourselves to be returned to you via a pension with a mainstream Life Assurance company or Workplace pension scheme. Green Pension Trustees Ltd. Registered in England & Wales No

2 BACKGROUND: MARK HARRIS & ACMAL The failings of Mr Mark Harris and of ACMAL have been many and varied. There was a clear failure to keep, let alone produce for us, proper accounting records. Annual accounts were not drawn up for any scheme year. Nor have such accounts been externally audited. Trustee reports have not been prepared. Investment decisions were taken without the Trustee taking independent advice. Due diligence does not appear to have been undertaken. The consequences of these failings are reflected in the GFI investment losses, and in almost every member holding some other investment ostensibly tied up until They also manifest themselves in our ongoing inability to produce definitive statements for members. The absence of audited accounts is not something that pensions law permits to now pass: having accounts externally audited is an important safeguard for pension scheme members. There is still considerable administrative work required to complete the financial records and draw up accounts. Then there will be considerable fees payable to the Statutory Auditors fees that should have been met by ACMAL when they were purporting to administer the schemes. Throughout 2016, the time-cost fees behind our own work were met by Taurus Business Consulting Ltd (the sponsoring employer ) of the schemes. There was no charge to members. We are now informed by Taurus that there are no further funds to pay for our work. Consequently, it is necessary to introduce a charge of 35 per quarter per member. Also, from the quotes that we have received, the fees for the Statutory Auditors are likely to be in the region of 30,000-40,000 i.e. possibly 160 per member. Clearly, these costs are all unwelcome. They would not be needed and the work in question not needed had the schemes been properly run by Mr Harris and ACMAL. To add insult to injury however, Mr Harris authorised the Schemes to pay ACMAL (his company) in the region of 350,000 ( 1,420 from each member s pension pot) for what purports to have been their administration services We therefore propose to ask the Pensions Ombudsman to direct Mr Harris and ACMAL to refund some or all of the monies taken by ACMAL. The amount recoverable in practice is difficult to estimate. Clearly, we hope this is sufficient to offset this year s administration costs & likely audit fees, and to provide a refund to members pension pots. In addition, we advise that members who have suffered stress or anxiety over this matter take the opportunity to ask for 500 as nominal compensation. BACKGROUND: CLAIMING FOR NEGLIGENT FINANCIAL ADVICE All members of the Green and Fixed Income Schemes received financial advice from authorised independent financial advisers ( IFAs ). Those IFAs recommended you to transfer one or more old pension pots to the «clientscheme». You were badly advised. We do not believe any member had any reason for needing to transfer their old pensions to these Schemes. Your old pension arrangements were better suited to your needs. These were run by large companies with the resources and oversight to run pension schemes properly. They were invested in funds that tended to invest in a wide range of different companies. Their pension funds were not dependent on the success of any one Company or investment scheme. If your old pension arrangements ever lost money with falls in the stockmarket, they always had the chance to make up those losses when stockmarkets recovered. By transferring away from that type of well-established pension scheme to this type of small pension scheme, you lost these advantages. By transferring like this, you were always going Page 2

3 to be exposed to the risk that these Schemes might be poorly run. By transferring away from your old pension with its established mainstream investment-links, you were always going to be prone to the risk of investing into things that were over-concentrated, difficult to encash or just plain fraudulent. You did not have these risks with your old pensions. You should have been advised to stay with your old pension arrangements. If you really did not like your old pension provider, or their performance was relatively poor, then you should at least have been advised to transfer to the same type of pension as your old pension arrangement (albeit with a different provider). If you had been given the right financial advice, your pension pot would not have been so poorly administered. If you had been given the right financial advice, you and your pension pot would not have lost money in the Para Sky / GFI fraud. Your IFA was the author of your misfortune. To be clear, we mean the IFA firm who advised you to transfer to this scheme. (If you ve got another IFA or a new IFA since, we don t mean them!) We believe that the most efficient way for you to recover monies lost to the GFI fraud is to gain compensation for the negligent financial advice that you received. We therefore propose to introduce you to a claims lawyer Alasdair Sampson and his company Financial Services Redress (UK) Ltd. We would recommend that we do this even if you have already spoken to other claims companies. This is because most claims companies are not run by qualified solicitors unlike Financial Services Redress (UK) Ltd. Two (2) of the three (3) IFA firms who advised members are already in liquidation. We suspect the third IFA firm will enter liquidation once it begins to receive our claims. This is because we believe it lacks sufficient professional indemnity insurance to pay redress. In this event, your compensation will need to be recovered via the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). This requires FSCS to recognise the legal liability of the IFA firm. We therefore believe that an authorised Claims Management Company run by a real lawyer Financial Services Redress (UK) Ltd - is best placed to win compensation for you in this instance. Most claims companies by contrast are not lawyer and are not up to the job. We enclose a leaflet further explaining why Financial Services Redress (UK) Ltd, run by Alasdair Sampson, is best placed to gain compensation for you in respect of the negligent financial advice that you received. FURTHER ACTION BY GREEN PENSION TRUSTEES Independently of the actions we are recommending above, Green Pension Trustees Ltd will continue to liaise with various parties and follow some of the civil litigation and tracing concerning GFI Consultants Ltd, and its directors Andrew Skeene and Omari Bowers. Litigation like this can be extremely expensive and we have to be careful not to expose the Schemes to the risks of high legal costs. It is possible that we may join proceedings at a later stage, once much of the uncertainty in such action has been removed. We do however then risk standing behind other creditors. Given that the possibility of recovery through these efforts contains a great deal of uncertainty at this stage, claiming for the negligent financial advice received represents a prudent and efficient way for you to recover your losses in the meantime. Page 3

4 NEXT STEPS More information, including a set of Questions & Answers, is being posted on to our website: To start matters rolling, please check / complete and sign the enclosed Response Form and return it to us in the pre paid envelope provided. Unfortunately, there will be further paperwork to follow in respect of both actions. We look forward to hearing from you. Yours faithfully [Signed On Original] Jonathan Purle For & On Behalf of Green Pension Trustees Ltd info@greentrustees.com Page 4

5 RESPONSE FORM Personal Details: «memname» DoB: «clientdob» Scheme: «clientscheme» Membership No: «client2ndref» Address: (Please write any corrections here) «memaddress1» «memaddress2» «memaddress3» «memaddress4» «memaddress5» «mem » Ensuring we have your up-to-date address is very important TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: (Please delete any statement that does not apply) I want Green Pension Trustees Ltd to act on my behalf in bringing a claim against Mark Harris and AC Management & Administration Ltd before the Pensions Ombudsman. I appoint Green Pension Trustees Ltd as my representative in these proceedings. I wish to be introduced to Financial Services Redress (UK) Ltd with a view to making a claim in respect of the financial advice that I received. I authorise Green Pension Trustees Ltd to pass my details to Financial Services Redress (UK) Ltd. I authorise Green Pension Trustees Ltd and Financial Services Redress (UK) Ltd to liaise with each other, and to share personal data in respect of me, in order to progress my claim(s). (If you would like your claim before the Pensions Ombudsman to include an award for distress & inconvenience, please use this space to describe any problems or stresses that you have suffered as a result of how Mr Harris / ACMAL ran the schemes) SIGNED: DATED: Green Pension Trustees Ltd. Registered in England & Wales No