While ING is no doubt unhappy that the status of its credit funds have hit the headlines, I would have to say that it has been the sleeping dog of the industry all year.

Clearly from the amount of coverage the story has had, plus the responses to previous Blogs, it is something which has bothered many people. It’s also something, I suggest, may create a few fault lines within the industry.

Some may consider a previous Blog as putting the boot into ING. I can assure you that was not its purpose. The issue raised then was about its communications strategy – or lack thereof.

ING has acknowledged it dropped the ball here and has even apologised.

There are two other issues which are worth debating, namely how the funds were sold and the issue of unitholder equity.

On the first I put this question to ING chief executive Helen Troup: Were these funds mis-sold?

She “strongly refuted” this suggestion. Her response was in two parts. No, ING did not misrepresent the funds. Secondly, it had no control over how advisers sold the funds.

I accept the point that at the time the funds were promoted ING did not deliberately mislead advisers and clients.

My definition of mis-selling is where a company or person goes and deliberately misrepresents a product. I would suggest Bridgecorp was closer to mis-selling as it portrayed its business quite differently to reality.

With the credit funds, the issue here is two-fold. Firstly these were new, highly engineered products that no one really knew how they would perform, especially when the markets change.

It brings to mind that adage about only investing in things you really understand.

Secondly, is the question when the credit crisis started last year, did ING change its view on these funds and how they were performing, and did they communicate the situation to investors and advisers?

I can’t answer that question, but hindsight would suggest that it should have been changing its marketing tactics.

The other point is around investor equity. It seems that quite a few investors managed to exit these funds at, what now looks like, good prices between when the credit crisis started and the date of the freeze of redemptions in April.

This is something which is a bottom line issue. If the remaining investors get some tiny return of principal – say 15c in the dollar – then there is surely a case that the company should come to the party to some degree.