Margaret and David Fee paid more than £5,000 for their original funeral plans
Margaret and David Fee spent thousands of pounds on pre-paid funeral plans to lessen the trauma for their loved ones when they died.
But in 2022, they were among 46,000 people who discovered Safe Hands Plans Ltd – the company they trusted to organise their funerals – had collapsed.
Two years on, and while an ongoing fraud investigation is looking into the firm’s dealings, Margaret and David are no closer to getting a penny back, or to finding the answers that they are demanding about what went wrong.
And with a new government in place, a consumer group is calling for ministers to launch a public inquiry into the defunct funeral firm.
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Margaret – a former bereavement services officer with the NHS – said the plans were paid for from David’s pension pot.
She said she only worked part-time, so had a “very small” pension pot.
The pair, both 78, are now retired and living in Ratby, Leicestershire.
They invested £2,745 each from David’s pension to pay for their funerals in 2015.
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Safe Hands assured them their money was ringfenced and protected, with all aspects of the funerals accounted for.
But seven years later, the company went into administration and with it, went the couple’s money.
Funeral plans are designed to allow people to set money aside during their lives, to help their families pay for a funeral when they die.
Previous unregulated
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The plans became particularly popular as funeral prices soared, but there were questions over the lack of protection if a provider went bust.
Since July 2022, providers have required approval to operate from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), giving consumers greater protection.
Safe Hands was one of dozens of companies operating in the previously unregulated pre-paid funeral sector, and collapsed four months before the measures came in.
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) opened its investigation, which is ongoing, into Safe Hands in October 2023.
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Paying out for a replacement funeral plan from David’s pension has left the pair with very little each month to live on, they said
As customers who bought directly through Safe Hands, Margaret and David were offered the chance to pay half the amount again to renew their full plan with either Dignity or Co-op.
Margaret and David – a former electrical maintenance engineer – took up this offer, paying one plan upfront using money from David’s pension fund, and the second on a monthly payment plan, both with Dignity.
They say the firm’s collapse hit their monthly premiums and left them in a vulnerable financial position.
“We never thought we’d be in this position to pay off something monthly again. We thought we were comfortable. Now, we’re not getting into debt but there’s nothing left. There’s no money for treats,” said Margaret.
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They believe their health has suffered because of it.
David, speaking tearfully as Margaret comforted him, said: “It gets you inside, stomach ulcers and that through worry, and all these things add up eventually.
“And sometimes you think, is it worth carrying on? But you’ve got to.”
The couple were informed of the company going into administration by a letter from FRP Advisory
Gill Marshall, a retired grandmother of four, paid £4,000 for a Safe Hands funeral plan.
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Her husband, Paul, died suddenly aged 57 while on a trip in France in 2012.
The family did not have a plan, insurance or enough funds to pay for the repatriation.
To bring her husband home and organise his funeral, Gill – from Grantham in Lincolnshire – had to borrow the money, took out a bereavement loan from the government, and came close to losing the family home in the process.
“It was a really difficult time and I just did not want my children to be in that position,” she said.
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So, for her funeral, Gill turned took out a Safe Hands plan.
She gave the matter no more thought until a letter arrived on 19 September 2022, informing her the company had gone into administration.
“You’re just lost aren’t you? Because the money’s gone,” she said.
“You thought you were set up, and then not only have you not got a funeral plan, but you haven’t got the money to put it into another one.”
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Gill Marshall says she can no longer afford to get a replacement funeral plan
The administrators for Safe Hands, FRP Advisory, declined to comment on the ongoing situation.
But it has issued four publicly-available progress reports since it took over administration of the firm.
In its latest report from May, the administrators stated it had “continued to pursue claims”.
The report states it has made “substantial progress with the process of adjudicating planholders’ submitted claims”.
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However, the firm has not yet been able to return any money to Safe Hands customers.
Safe Hands went into administration in 2022
Prior to the collapse of Safe Hands, there was no industry regulation as long as the money was kept in a trust, meaning it would be carefully handled by account trustees.
But by July 2022, all pre-paid funeral firms had to get approval to operate from the FCA.
Safe Hands applied, but the company then withdrew its application. Unable to trade without regulation, the company went into administration in March 2022.
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FRP Advisory told the BBC planholders are owed an estimated £70.6m – and the expected returns are between £8m and £10.9m.
No repayment terms
The administrators’ progress documents show a series of financial transactions made prior to the collapse of Safe Hands.
Of the tens of millions owed to planholders, the documents show £45.1m of investments were made in the Cayman Islands – where there is no UK jurisdiction.
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In addition, in 2018, a loan of about £3.5m was received by the company’s previous owner, Malcolm David Milson. According to documents filed by Safe Hands on Companies House, it was issued without any repayment terms.
The BBC has invited Mr Milson to comment on the payment, but he did not respond.
Financial expert Lara Gee says the number of offshore investments makes it hard to work out where the money has gone
Lara Gee – financial expert and associate professor in accounting at the University of Nottingham – says the company had plenty of time to get its finances in order, to be able to comply with regulation.
“In 2017, Safe Hands themselves were part of the original group of funeral care plan issuers that came together to discuss the future of the industry and how it should be regulated,” she said.
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“With that in mind, you would expect that they would look at what the FCA might require of them, they would be making investments in line with the regulation requirements so they would be ready, well ahead, as many other providers did.”
Both former owners of Safe Hands – Mr Milson and Richard Philip Wells – were contacted about the company’s finances, but they did not respond.
In October, the Serious Fraud Office opened an investigation into Safe Hands Plans and its parent company SHP Capital Holdings Ltd
Consumer group Fairer Finance says with a new government in place, it will now push for a public inquiry.
It says it warned the Treasury, and the FCA, in a meeting back in 2017 about the financial situation with Safe Hands and the risk of it collapsing.
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It believes if the organisations had taken action, the significant loss for planholders could have been avoided.
The FCA says at the time, it had limited powers as Safe Hands was not regulated.
Meanwhile, a Treasury spokesperson said: “Once concerns were raised about the funeral plan market, we made it illegal to sell pre-paid funeral plans without authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority – protecting 1.6 million customers and their families.”
In response to its ongoing inquiry, the Serious Fraud Office told the BBC that its “active criminal investigation into alleged fraud” by Safe Hands and its parent company SHP Capital Holdings Limited was progressing.
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The organisation has not given any indication as to how long the investigation could take, which is of little consolation to those who have lost money – like Margaret and David.
“I think they want criminally prosecuting – to tell the truth,” Margaret added.
“They’ve caused so much pain to such a vulnerable age group.”
China’s central bank has unveiled a major package of measures aimed at reviving the country’s flagging economy.
People’s Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Pan Gongsheng announced plans to lower borrowing costs and allow banks to increase their lending.
The move comes after a series of disappointing data has increased expectations in recent months that the world’s second largest economy will miss its own 5% growth target this year.
Stock markets in Asia jumped after Mr Pan’s announcement.
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Speaking at a rare news conference alongside officials from two other financial regulators, Mr Pan said the central bank would cut the amount of cash banks have to hold in reserve – known as reserve requirement ratios (RRR).
The RRR will initially be cut by half a percentage point, in a move expected to free up about 1 trillion yuan ($142bn; £106bn).
Mr Pan added that another cut may be made later in the year.
Further measures aimed to boost China’s crisis-hit property market include cutting interest rates for existing mortgages and lowering minimum down payments on all types of homes to 15%.
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The country’s real estate industry has been struggling with a sharp downturn since 2021.
Several developers have collapsed, leaving large numbers of unsold homes and unfinished building projects.
The PBOC’s new economic stimulus measures come just days after the US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates for the first time in more than four years with a bigger than usual cut.
In Asia afternoon trading hours, major stock indexes in Shanghai and Hong Kong were more than 3% higher.
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Halloween is still over a month away, but here’s a scary chart of Bloomberg’s US Government Securities Liquidity Index.
The higher the score, the less liquid the $27tn Treasury market is. So according to this index — which is derived from how dispersed Treasury prices are from a smoothed yield curve — the US government bond market is now less liquid than it was at the peak of the March 2020 chaos.
FT Alphaville has been keeping an eye on this measure because it shows a radically different picture from what analysts and officials are saying, and what the headline data seems to indicate. August was the first month in history when the average daily notional of Treasuries being traded went over $1tn, up 37 per cent year-on-year, according to Coalition Greenwich. Treasury futures trading is up by a similar amount.
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Which is why this annual check-up of the Treasury market’s liquidity from the New York Federal Reserve is so timely.
The tl;dr is that bid-ask spreads remain modest — and not nearly where they were in March 2020 — while market depth remains reasonable, if subdued after the Fed’s interest rate hikes.
As a result, the estimated price impact of a $100mn Treasury trade is also un-alarming. Big trades make a bigger splash than they used to, but the deterioration seems mostly caused by higher interest rate volatility, which is now coming down a bit.
The author — Michael Fleming, the head of capital markets studies at the NY Fed’s research group — does explore the discrepancy between these measures of liquidity and that shown by the Bloomberg’s index, but mostly shrugs it off:
While the Bloomberg measure has recently risen, it remains far below its peak during the GFC. Moreover, it remained far below its GFC peak in March 2020 even when direct liquidity measures approached GFC levels and the Fed unleashed massive asset purchases to address the dysfunction then roiling the market. It follows that the recent behavior of the Bloomberg index seems less notable when examined in a longer historical context. The reasons behind the disparate performances of the different measures are an interesting area for future research.
This research should probably focus on the Bloomberg index’s underlying composition. Barclays analysts have previously noted that the Bloomberg index might have been artificially boosted this summer because of the inclusion of some very old 30-year Treasuries, which are for motley reasons trading extremely rich to what the shape of the yield curve would normally indicate.
FTAV has another, admittedly more speculative take. These kinds of price-dispersion-versus-fair-prices indices supposedly measure liquidity conditions because a lot of wonky prices indicate that there’s insufficient capital in the market to take advantage of them.
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But this would seem to be a better measure of fragility rather than liquidity?
In other words, Treasury market liquidity might be basically fine and perhaps improving, but the underlying fragility of the market is increasing, as banks devote less and less balance sheet to lubricating it? In which case we won’t really know how healthy it is until the next shock hits.
California’s attorney general is suing ExxonMobil, alleging the oil giant engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception” about the effectiveness of plastics recycling.
In the civil lawsuit filed on Monday, Attorney General Rob Bonta accused Exxon of contributing to a “deluge” of plastic pollution, while telling Californians that recycling was a fix.
“For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Bonta said.
In a statement, Exxon blamed California for an inefficient recycling programme.
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“For decades, California officials have known their recycling system isn’t effective. They failed to act, and now they seek to blame others. Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem and keep plastic out of landfills,” the company said in a statement.
An Exxon spokesperson added that the company had processed more than 60 million pounds (27 million kilograms) of plastic waste into usable raw materials, “keeping it out of landfills”.
Bonta’s office said the case marks the first time US officials have attempted to hold a gas or oil company accountable for deceptive claims about plastics recycling.
California is seeking an unspecified amount of money that Bonta said could come to as much as “multiple billions of dollars”.
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“ExxonMobil lied to further its [record]-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardising our health,” he said.
Last year, Bonta sued ExxonMobil as well as four other oil giants for compensation over climate change damages.
The most recent lawsuit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, comes after a nearly two-year investigation by Bonta’s office into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries and global plastics pollution.
ExxonMobil is the world’s largest producer of resins used for single-use plastics, according a report by Australia’s Minderoo Foundation.
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Bonta alleged that, through its marketing, the company was promoting its “advanced recycling” programme to the public as a solution to plastic waste, while knowing that the company would “never be able to process more than a tiny fraction of the plastic waste it produces”.
The 147-page suit alleges that nearly all of plastic waste processed by the company has been turned into fuel instead of recycled plastic.
The deception violated state nuisance, natural resources, water pollution, false advertisement and unfair competition laws, Bonta said.
The world produces over 400 million tons of plastic each year, but only 9% is recycled, according to a 2022 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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China’s central bank has cut its benchmark interest rate as part of a broad set of easing measures to boost the world’s second-largest economy as it risks missing growth targets this year.
People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng on Tuesday said the short-term seven-day reverse repo rate, the central bank’s main policy rate, would be reduced from 1.7 per cent to 1.5 per cent.
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The PBoC will also cut the reserve requirement ratio, the amount lenders must keep in reserves, by 0.5 percentage points, he said, while signalling a further potential cut of 0.25 to 0.5 percentage points this year. The RRR cut would add Rmb1tn ($142bn) in liquidity to the banking system, he said.
In addition to the monetary easing, the PBoC also announced government funding to boost the stock market and aid share buybacks, as well as extra support for China’s stricken property sector.
China’s blue-chip CSI 300 index of Shanghai- and Shenzhen-listed shares rose 2.4 per cent on Tuesday. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose 3.3 per cent, led higher by mainland Chinese companies listed in the territory.
Pan said the measures aimed to “support the stable growth of China’s economy” and “promote a moderate rebound in prices”.
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China’s economic growth has decelerated in recent months as a prolonged slowdown in the property sector has weighed on consumer sentiment and curbed spending.
Economists have slashed their growth forecasts to less than the government’s official target of about 5 per cent for 2024 as deflationary forces have proven persistent, with producer prices declining since last year.
Policymakers have turned to exports in the hope that the housing crisis will bottom out, but robust shipments of electric vehicles, batteries and other goods have not been enough to fully offset the weaker domestic economy.
“The Chinese economy is recovering and the monetary policies introduced by our bank this time will help support the real economy, incentivise spending and investment and also provide a stable footing for the exchange rate,” Pan said.
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Pan was joined by Li Yunze, director of the new financial sector watchdog, the National Financial Regulatory Administration, and Wu Qing, chair of the markets supervisor, the China Securities Regulatory Commission.
The officials said the government would boost stock market liquidity by allowing brokers, insurance companies and funds to tap central bank facilities to buy stocks. The PBoC will also provide relending facilities for shareholders to conduct buybacks.
“A fresh stimulus push is certainly positive,” said Liu Chang, macro economist at BNP Paribas Asset Management.
But with economic momentum weak heading into the fourth quarter, officials need to act “very quickly in the weeks ahead to implement additional measures if they wish to get to the 5 per cent target”.
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“In this regard, we think there is still a worrying lack of urgency behind their words around stimulus,” Liu said.
In other measures, the bank lowered mortgage downpayments for second homes to 15 per cent from 25 per cent. Second properties had been subject to more onerous conditions to curb real estate speculation, previously a focus for President Xi Jinping.
The PBoC also said it would provide better terms for a destocking programme, under which the central bank made Rmb300bn available to local government-owned enterprises to help them buy up unsold inventory from property developers.
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But the central bank stopped short of increasing the funds available under the programme, amid signs it was struggling to gain traction.
Economists have said reducing China’s vast stock of unsold housing is crucial to restoring confidence in the economy and reviving domestic consumption.
Reuters was first to report that National Instruments Corp had received acquisition interest from Emerson Electric. A few days after the Reuters news, Emerson disclosed a nearly $7 billion hostile offer for NI, which the company had been trying to buy unsuccessfully for several months.
Former Harrods chief executive, James McArthur, witnessed “abhorrent” behaviour from Mohamed Al Fayed, but not sexual abuse, he has told the BBC.
The late Harrods owner has been accused of sexual assault and rape by more than 20 women, who spoke to the BBC for a documentary broadcast last week.
Mr McArthur was chief executive at Harrods for ten months in 2008, a time when the Metropolitan police investigated an alleged assault on a 15-year-old girl in a Harrods boardroom.
He says he was unaware of the investigation, even though it was covered in the media at the time, which he says he doesn’t recall.
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In a written statement, he told the BBC: “I was indeed CEO of Harrods for a short, and most unpleasant, 10 months during 2008 under Fayed [sic].”
“While Fayed’s behaviour was often abhorrent in many ways, and professional relationships with him were largely dysfunctional, I was not aware of any sexual abuse by him – if I had been, I would have taken action,” he said.
The “abhorrent” behaviour included Fayed’s inappropriate sense of humour, and lack of professional conduct, he said.
Ten months is a very short stint for a chief executive, and turnover of chief executives and other directors was high at Harrods under Fayed’s ownership.
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Mr McArthur added: “I was also not aware of a Met Police investigation into Fayed’s conduct during 2008. Fayed would, I imagine, have tried to keep anything like that closely under his control within the secure precinct of the chairman’s office.”
The initial accusation in 2008 and the subsequent investigation were covered in a number of newspaper articles. Questioned about this, Mr McArthur said, “I do not recall that at all.”
Mr McArthur added: “I am absolutely horrified by the details of the allegations bravely brought to light through the BBC. My heart goes out to Fayed’s victims, and I do hope very much that they will get the justice and closure that they are seeking.”
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After leaving Harrods, Mr McArthur was chief executive of handbag maker Anya Hindmarch for four years, then held a number of roles including chairman of Lulu Guinness, according to his LinkedIn profile. He now lists his occupation as “investor/director/adviser”.
The BBC has contacted a number of former directors of Harrods during Al-Fayed’s ownership.
Yesterday the chief executive of the department store Selfridges, Andre Maeder, who was a director at Harrods for six years between 1996 and 2002, told the BBC he was “horrified” to learn about the alleged rapes and sexual assaults detailed in the documentary, but said he “never saw or heard anything” about this “abhorrent” behaviour.
Richard Simonin, chief executive from 2003 to 2005, declined to comment when contacted by the social networking site LinkedIn.
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Harrods was bought by the gulf state of Qatar in 2010. The new owner has admitted that victims were failed, and said it would settle legal claims.
Yesterday it emerged that Harrods is investigating whether current staff were involved in any of the allegations against Fayed, who died last year aged 94.
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