Friday 12th of October 2007

So the legal eagles, or should they be called vultures, are now circling the decaying remains of collapsed finance companies looking for options to take legal action. Yes I know it sounds a little dramatic, but I have this picture in my head of vultures circling some dead beasts in the desert looking for something to feed off. I guess it was predictable that this would happen, but it is surprising how many have suddenly appeared. In our story on Good Returns today there are four lawyers named. When we, earlier in the week, spoke to one, Andrew Hooker, he wasn't particularly forthcoming on what he was doing and kept repeating a line about only wanting to help clients and adding in it wasn't a witch hunt against advisers. While one has to take him at his word, there is still a feeling that amongst all this legal interest there is some anti-adviser element. One of my concerns, as mentioned previously, is that all advisers are being caught up in these collapses when clearly not all of them use finance companies and of those who do use finance companies the large majority have no doubt been sensible about how they have done it. Or put it this way I suspect it would be very hard to argue that the advice has been incompetent. Hopefully some of these lawyers will read Andy Harris's comments we reported on Tuesday. Harris, a former Bridgecorp business development manager, takes a strong stand for advisers. Another issue which becoming intertwined with all this is the involvement of Kapiti-based adviser Chris Lee. Lee seems to becoming more and more involved in a lot of the discussion around finance company collapses and I wouldn't be surprised to see him come under attack soon. He tends to polarise people and I hear some of his anti-fans are planning to add a new dimension to his profile.