EMAG

The independent action group for current and ex Equitable Life policyholders, funded by contributions.

Equitable Members Action Group

Equitable Members Action Group Limited, a company limited by guarantee, number 5471535 registered in the UK

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Correspondence: 02/03/2005 - EMAG wrote to Judge Langley

The Honourable Mr Justice Langley
QBD Commercial Court
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London WC2A 2LL
The Equitable Members' Action Group (EMAG)
42 Bartholomew Villas
Kentish Town
London NW5 2LL

2 March 2005


Your Honour,

Equitable Life: Expert witness statements, EMAG standing and the bundle.

You may recall that I corresponded with you and you clerk on matters Equitable Life back in October 2003. At that time I sought, without any success, to achieve clients' and solicitors' agreement for EMAG to receive copies of all of the witness statement after they were to be lodged at your Court at the end of January 2004.

EMAG was formed in the summer of 2000, immediately following the House of Lords ruling on the Hyman case. Since our first constitution, EMAG has never varied from seeking to represent ALL classes of policyholders. That was modified, post the adoption of the section 425 Scheme of Arrangement on 1 March 2002, to embrace past as well as present policyholders, with the over-arching EMAG objective to seek justice and compensation for policyholders.

As EMAG is a successfully funded not-for-profit membership organisation, we have had sufficient resources and professionally qualified manpower to commission many valuable independent reports from academics, accountants and solicitors and also instigated a judicial review against the Parliamentary Ombudsman - now satisfactorily resolved. Additionally, EMAG has made many submissions in its own name to the series of reports by Lord Penrose, Sir Derek Morris and Paul Myners as well as seven submissions to various select committees of Parliament. EMAG has received subscriptions from more than 15,000 Equitable Life policyholders, including more than 5,000 new ones in 2005. EMAG maintains THE website of record, which contains the broadest archive of all materials relating to Equitable Life - FAR more extensive and objective that Equitable's own. It is update every week at: www.emag.org.uk

EMAG has four main strands of activity
  1. Helping the new Investigation by the Parliamentary Ombudsman in every way we can. For example, EMAG submitted its definitive 80-page substantiation to the claims of maladministration on 1 March.

  2. Pursuing a Petition to the European Parliament (numbered 29/2005), which argues that the British Government has failed to implement the protection it is obligated to provide to citizens across Europe, as required by the Third Life Directive.

  3. Making representation to the chief ombudsman and all the board of the Financial Ombudsman Service to argue the case that the FOS should proceed to look at ELAS complaints, contrary to the representation made by ELAS on 15 November, 2004. This, because the minister responsible (Ruth Kelly) undertook, when presenting the Penrose Report to the Commons on 8 March 2004, that the FOS was the appropriate adjudication service for policyholders who wished to complain of mis-selling based on the Penrose Report.

  4. Monitoring the litigation by the Society that is to come before you for 11 April. This is of particular concern to the committee of EMAG because we hold the view that many of the individuals who could have given Lord Penrose valuable insights were silenced into non-participation by these two actions, which were announced by ELAS in April 2002. We fear that all the vital documents which, no doubt, reveal as yet unknown truths may fail to ever reach public domain, as a result of any settlement, with gagging, between the parties achieved at what is now the 11th hour.
I describe EMAG at some length in order to demonstrate its bona fides. The documentation already lodged at Court could, without doubt, be material to all of the first three of EMAG's activities listed above.

EMAG enquires respectfully whether EMAG/its committee could be accorded "standing", in the public interest? We seek the Court's permission for EMAG to pay for the full bundle - quoted in the hearing to cost £9,000 - and also the prerogative to buy the daily transcripts. It will be EMAG committee's intention to provide a rota of members to attend the daily trial hearings. However, as I recall happening in January 2003, one of the barrister appearing inadvertently quoted the year of a meeting with the GAD incorrectly. For such reason, access to corrected transcripts would be preferable. EMAG is, of course, willing to pay the required rate for marginal extra copies.

The expert witness statements of Mike Arnold:

I myself was in your Court for the entire Case Progress Review day on 4 February.

Two separate expert witness statements for the Society by actuary Mike Arnold were discussed repeatedly. At 10.43am, there was reference by Mark Hapgood QC to Mike Arnold apparently having no choice but to incorporate the figure of £1.4m, as the prospective GAR cost. In the afternoon, at 2.50pm, Mark Hapgood QC questioned the apparent conflict over the costs, without explanation, of £791m versus £520m. You yourself understood that there was a clear explanation for each - one being the "most likely" and the other being "minimum prudent" - having applied different criteria.

The discussion continued back and forth over Mike Arnold's proposal that the auditors could and should have insisted on a "Maturity Value Adjuster", as introduced by the current board on 1 July 2002. Mark Hapgood QC correctly pointed our that by July 2002 ELAS had been a closed fund for 18 months, with PRE having been destroyed - a very different scenario from the position of a going-concern in the spring of 2000, when the auditors were required to sign off on the Report and Accounts and regulatory returns for the year 1999.

I go to such lengths to establish what has already been discussed in detail in your Court and to earnestly request that EMAG be granted copies, at your Honour's discretion, of these two particular Arnold documents on the grounds that, having been referred to extensively in the Court, they should now be deemed to be in the public domain.

If the cases proceed, I will be seeing a lot more of you in your Court number 76. I trust that the acoustics (and Jules Sher QC) will be audibly improved!

Yours sincerely,


Paul Braithwaite
General secretary of EMAG
See www.emag.org.uk
Email: emagpr@yahoo.com
Tel: 020 7267 5938