Mattioli Woods has helped clients recover almost £10m of funds that had been lost to Stadia Trustees.
The wealth manager and employee benefits adviser had been working with the Financial Services Compensation Scheme to help investors recover these funds.
In 2016 it was appointed by the Financial Conduct Authority to assist with various Sipp schemes which had been operated by Stadia Trustees.
Its role has been to act as the provider of the default scheme for receipt of transfers from Stadia Trustees. As a result around 1,000 clients transferred to Mattioli Woods. The majority of these had exposure to non-standard and potentially high-risk investments — many of which were at that time valued at nil, while others investments had been written off entirely.
In 2018, Stadia Trustees was placed in default and the FSCS invited clients to claim for compensation for the failed or unsuitable investments, up to the value of £50,000.
Mattioli Woods offered to assist these clients with their claims, free of charge, and worked with the FSCS to streamline the process to make it as easy as possible for them.
Since January 2018, Mattioli Woods has helped reclaim almost £10 million of funds for these clients who had lost most, if not all, of their retirement funds. The company has submitted over 350 claims to the FSCS and are continuing to assist clients with their claims over the coming months.
Mattioli Woods wealth management director Alex Brown says: ‘As a group, we were proud to have been appointed to help secure the benefits for those clients of Stadia Trustees who had lost almost all of their hard-earned retirement funds.
“Non-standard investments are only appropriate for either sophisticated investors or high net worth individuals. Unfortunately, most of these clients were neither. To have assisted in helping to reclaim almost £10 million of these lost funds is a huge milestone and one that our clients have shown great appreciation for.”