That the sales force succeeded in selling so many patently unsuitable precipice bonds to their customers shows how

That the sales force succeeded in selling so many patently unsuitable precipice bonds to their customers shows how formidable this marketing machine still is. It also raises awkward longer-term questions not addressed as often as they should be.
The first point one, grudgingly or not, is to give credit where credit is due. Lloyds TSB can rightly boast that it is the most effective protagonist in the UK of so-called bancassurance, the strategy of using its bank network and in-house team of financial consultants to sell its customers all manner of other financial products.The whole idea behind Lloyds TSB buying Scottish Widows was to take the name and product range of the venerable life company and use them to push millions of pounds of business through the bank’s High Street network. The news that Lloyds TSB has been forced to pay £100m in fines and compensation to hapless customers to whom it (and a number of IFAs) sold toxic “precipice bonds” is another unhappy reminder of the shortcomings in our financial services industry. We are not shocked by it and, as it happens, Rupert has behaved better than France Telecom.

There’s a thought.s.ogrady independent.co.uk. It is simply that we small shareholders knew it was a Murdoch family circus when we bought the shares. There’s been a lot of fuss, quite justified, about Rupert Murdoch, the chairman, naming his son James, aged 31, as chief executive, as seems likely. It doesn’t sound like an attractive offer.And talking about minority shareholdings, I ought to also make just one point about BSkyB, where anyone whose surname isn’t Murdoch is, by definition, a junior partner. I’m not quite sure, because I haven’t yet found whether France Telecom is quite the basket case I think it is. It certainly seems to rely very heavily on the French government, its majority shareholder for its financial security, such as it is.So Orange shareholders are, effectively, being asked to swap a position where they are a minority and abused shareholder in one telecoms company for another minority holding, no doubt shortly to be abused, in another telecoms company. It is outrageous that it wasn’t because it implies Orange shareholders have no option other than to accept the bullying of France Telecom and accept their shares.

It seems sharp practice, and mostly futile, because folk who went to the bother of buying Orange shares would have been, I would have thought, a slightly more experienced type of investor who could spot these sorts of games a mile off.So should we take the money or accept shares in an appallingly indebted France Telecom? It doesn’t sound like a hard choice and I think I have decided to sell up. They have to ask for a form for the special postal dealing service. The commission is a reasonable £10 per deal.The point, though, is that such a form should have been included in the original mailing. When I rang the number (0870 703 0045 if you’ve mislaid it) it was answered promptly and the man on the other end of the line was clear about what shareholders had to do if they wanted to sell.