Have you invested your pension into The Resort Group?
Were you mis-led in relation to how high-risk the investment was?
Have you lost money and feel like you’ve been misguided?
If you have invested in The Resort Group through a self-invested personal pension (SIPP) and have lost money, you may be entitled to compensation.
Our team at Claim Experts can determine whether you have a legitimate claim for compensation. We work on a No Win, No Fee basis and have helped many clients in relation to mis-sold pensions.
Here, you can discover who The Resort Group are, what they did wrong, and whether you have a claim for compensation.
Who are The Resort Group?
The Resort Group was founded in 2007 by CEO, Rob Jarrett, a former banker and financial consultant at Prudential. It owned four luxury resorts in Tortuga, Dunas Beach, Llana and White Sands. It offered overseas property investments, which were to build resorts and hotel, in Cape Verde off the coast of Africa.
2007, however, was a relatively unfortunate time to set up a company of this nature, with the crash of the financial markets in 2008. To keep investment money coming in, The Resort Group set up a convoluted system of organisations which seemed to point towards investing into their company. This included a call centre called Lifetime Connections and a pension review company called First Review Pension Services, which were both heavily linked to The Resort Group.
A 2008 marketing brochure for The Resort Group, issued by an independent partner Kayden Estates, spoke about 20 per cent annual returns on the apartments.
Many people were convinced to invest their personal pension fund into the scheme.
The company hit national headlines in 2016 after a BBC Panorama programme uncovered evidence of unregulated financial advisors giving pension advice which included a guarantee of a 10 per cent interest after a year of investment into the Cape Verde scheme.
What did The Resort Group do wrong?
The investment which was marketed by The Resort Group was particularly high-risk, and was not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Many of the people who put money into The Resort Group were novice investors who were not told about the risks.
Unregulated, high-risk investments are not suitable for ordinary investors who are investing their life savings or pension pots.
In addition to this, the way investors were convinced to part with their money was also potentially dubious. There were high projected returns by advisers, celebrity endorsements and impressive marketing produced.
After numerous reports of investors’ discontent, the FCA started to issue questionnaires to investors. These questionnaires brought to light some of the major complaints that people had about The Resort Group. Returns on investment which were initially mentioned had failed to materialise. Many investors had been left with properties that rarely had tenants and were difficult to sell on.
The questionnaire also raised questions about how investors had been convinced to invest in the first place, with free pension reviews offered, high-pressure sales tactics and a campaign of cold-calling.
Do I have a claim against The Resort Group?
If you invested into The Resort Group and were not told about the high-risk nature, then you may have been mis-sold your investment, like hundreds of others.
Multiple financial advisers and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) have been paying out compensation to those who have been mis-sold the investment through investing via their SIPP.
This includes those who have:
- Transferred their pension to a SIPP
- Invested into The Resort Group
- Are not earning over £100k per year
- Not much investment experience
- Claimed to have been pushed into investing after heavy sales tactics
The Resort Group and their financial advisors who worked for them failed to carry out proper checks on the suitability of their investors. This has left many investors losing thousands of their savings. Does this sound like you?
How Claim Experts can help
Have you been mis-sold an investment by The Resort Group? Have you lost thousands of pounds and you are worried you’ll never see it again? Claim Experts can help you.
Every investment comes with risk, but if you have lost money on a mis-sold investment, we could help you get some of that money back.
If your claim is upheld, you’ll be entitled to compensation.
Our legal team have considerable experience of claims involving similar schemes. We are also regulated and authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority.
At ClaimExperts.co.uk we make claiming for compensation easy:
- No Win, No Fee*
- No Upfront Payments
- A Team of Experts
- Regulated and Authorised by The Financial Conduct Authority