I donât know about Spain but the branch of Citibank in Greece also adviced and sold those â100% principle protectionâ products to many of its private banking clients. Now Citibank claims to all those clients that the â100% principle protectionâ equals 100% principle lost. There are pending civil actions from many of the clients and total losses are estimated to 100 million.
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Help needed from someone familiar with Spanish bank laws
- Thread starter Mvic
- Start date
Thanks everyone, my father will be retaining an avogado on Monday, he aparently was not the only one in his cirdcle of freinds who was lied to by their Citibank Private con artist. Apparently the way the scam works is that they sell the paper as though it is 100 gauranteed BY CITIBANK, when infact it is 100% Gauranteed but by some other bank, in this case Lehman.
Will update as things progress, thanks again for your help and another lesson that show why managing your own money is the only way to be sure that you will still have some left at the end of the day.
Will update as things progress, thanks again for your help and another lesson that show why managing your own money is the only way to be sure that you will still have some left at the end of the day.
remind me of the time I walked into a local bank and I saw a guy with a sign said 12% return guarantee for your CD. Of course I signed up turn out the CD was underwritten by some trust not the bank, he just rented the lobby. The CD went zero eventually and I learned 12% of a zero is still a zero.
we had similar cases here in switzerland.
especially Credit Suisse were aggressively selling those lehman structured products with 100% capital protection...,
they didn't clearly state that lehman is behind it (eg. they printed the termsheet with the credit suisse logo)... and they probably didn't tell that there's the risk of lehman going bankrupt...
so the bank supervision in switzerland got plenty complains (600 million swiss francs are told to be in those lehman products).
Now credit suisse and other major banks agreed on reimbursing small investors (for CS it's those who have less than 100k in their account and deposit and a major part of this in those products).
for other clients they are dealing individual solutions..
from what i learned it's really hard to win a lawsuit.. but a government spokesman responsible of the matter told on tv, that if the bank mislead the investor or didn't tell the risks properly there is a chance they win in a lawsuit, since the law gives some protection especially to the small investor, who is expected to know very little and it's the banks responsibility to proper show the risks attached.
(but still difficult in lawsuit, since the term prospectus still has a passage saying something like "as with all derivatives there is the risk of a total loss in the case of the issuer..."..)
especially Credit Suisse were aggressively selling those lehman structured products with 100% capital protection...,
they didn't clearly state that lehman is behind it (eg. they printed the termsheet with the credit suisse logo)... and they probably didn't tell that there's the risk of lehman going bankrupt...
so the bank supervision in switzerland got plenty complains (600 million swiss francs are told to be in those lehman products).
Now credit suisse and other major banks agreed on reimbursing small investors (for CS it's those who have less than 100k in their account and deposit and a major part of this in those products).
for other clients they are dealing individual solutions..
from what i learned it's really hard to win a lawsuit.. but a government spokesman responsible of the matter told on tv, that if the bank mislead the investor or didn't tell the risks properly there is a chance they win in a lawsuit, since the law gives some protection especially to the small investor, who is expected to know very little and it's the banks responsibility to proper show the risks attached.
(but still difficult in lawsuit, since the term prospectus still has a passage saying something like "as with all derivatives there is the risk of a total loss in the case of the issuer..."..)
One additional note, the conversations were done in person but no paper work was produced and Lehman was never mentioned as issuing bank, the implication was always that these were products backed by Citibank. After my father had agreed to invest in these products he signed some single sheet of paper that did not have Lehman on it anywhere and then in the mail some time later received something, maybe a statement?, that has the name lehman attached to the instrument, unfortunately he had no idea that Lehman was a bank, to him it was just another term like Bono. I think that it is pretty clear on the face of it that Citibank and apparently many other banks have been trying and succeeding in pulling a fast one.
True that people should read everything that they sign but not sure that absolves Citibank of its fiduciary responsibility to deal forthrightly and ethically with thier clients. You shouldn't have to guard against your private banker's advice as though he were a snake in the grass.
I can just imagine the conference calls from New York telling the international private bankers in countries where they thought they could get away with this stuff (I wonder how many in the us were sold these, probably not too many due to liability) to unload as much Lehman crap on as many suckers as they could by any means necessary. I have now found out that they were still selling this stuff in Italy as late as a week before Lehman went tits up with no mention of Lehman being the guarantor!
Sometimes you pick a person who can make sure that what comes around indeed goes around.
True that people should read everything that they sign but not sure that absolves Citibank of its fiduciary responsibility to deal forthrightly and ethically with thier clients. You shouldn't have to guard against your private banker's advice as though he were a snake in the grass.
I can just imagine the conference calls from New York telling the international private bankers in countries where they thought they could get away with this stuff (I wonder how many in the us were sold these, probably not too many due to liability) to unload as much Lehman crap on as many suckers as they could by any means necessary. I have now found out that they were still selling this stuff in Italy as late as a week before Lehman went tits up with no mention of Lehman being the guarantor!
Sometimes you pick a person who can make sure that what comes around indeed goes around.