Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Trust and integrity

Hi Mr. Tan
Heard about this, but don't know how true is the report. There is a brokerage remiser whose clients defaulted on $1m stock losses, remiser could not pay, so his firm sued him for $2m. The incident happened during the recent financial crisis 2008.

This means the poor remiser has to pay $1m in interests within a span of two years. Owing to lack of consumer protection here in Singapore, this means we have to scrutinize all contracts with a fine comb, at the bottom in small wordings, there may be predatory terms that would bound us unfairly. A warning to all property mortgagees on mortgage loans, with its complicated 
tructured loans, now we may have to engage lawyers to assess them, better pay to have peace of mind, we don't want to be ridiculed for not going in with eyes open, should something untoward happens. We are living in a world where trust and integrity have gone to the dogs.


My views
I think that interest may take up 10% to 20% but the rest of the money is for paying legal fees. Lawyers can be very, very expensive. The court should impose some cap on the legal fees in such matters. It cannot be "charge as they like".

3 comments:

spavic said...

There are many many cases of these kind of "traps" in Singapore.

Is this what the government calls meritocracy?

If you get cheated, you deserve it because you are not as smart as others?

zhummmeng said...

Practically everyday the man in the street are being cheated by insurance agents and their companies and yet the regulator cares2 hoots.
If the agents peddle products they are as good as cheating because peddling products don't consider the customers' needs but thier own commission and it is cheating willfully. The agents know that product pushing need not justify the law of recommendation and the customers' needs. 90% of the insurance agents are cheats.

Tan Kin Lian said...

I suspect that the debt is $1 million and that the other $1 million come from legal fees (which should be quite high) and the interest charge (maybe at 10% or so).

Quite likely, the legal fees take up the bulk of the additional $1 million.

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