Correspondence: 13/12/2002 - Letter to Howard Davies of the FSA 13 December '02 - Letter
to Howard Davies of the FSA from Alex Henny Dear Howard, Although I had what I hope was a useful discussion with Mr. Strachan, I regret you did not telephone. I wanted to ask why you thought I was being unfair. I believe that many members of the Equitable consider they have been treated unfairly by regulators past and present in whom they implicitly placed their trust. And they have paid dearly for that unfairness. I did send a further letter to Mr. Tiner the day before yesterday and attach a copy. It demonstrates the complete disinterest that Charles Thomson has in providing members with information about the finances of the Society. To partially offset the Society's policy of obfuscation we commissioned Ned Cazalet and Burgess Hodson to explain to members the financial state of the Society. If the Society complied with all the FSA's good words of intent, and if the FSA had been doing its job for members, we would not have needed to commission the reports. To recapitulate, EMAG calls on the FSA to:-
In conformance with these fine words, we ask the FSA to instruct the Society to modernise its governance to radically improve the democratic accountability of the Board to the members. I attach the proposals which EMAG made. The Board's recent review of the articles dealt with trivial issues about spill-over rooms for general meetings and video conferenced board meetings, but entirely (and intentionally) ignored the major issues of governance in order that this floundering Board can protect itself from effective challenge. In doing this it ignored a petition by 16,179 members asking for changes to the arrangements for calling EGMs and putting resolutions to meetings. As I made clear to you and your colleagues, we are not aware of anything which the FSA has done for incumbent members . We ask you to change your approach. I wish you well at the LSE - when I spent some part-time there the grey spirits of Sydney and Beatrice hung over the place. Yours sincerely, ALEX HENNEY c.c. Mr. J. Tiner, Mr. D.
Strachan, EMAG Committee, EMAG website. |