Worth getting angry about?

Some things are worth getting hot under the collar about, rather than heaving a resigned sigh and changing the channel on the TV.  I suspect that the sordid saga of MP's expenses is one of those subjects - not merely because of the snout-in-trough culture which it reveals, but the very low regard for the electorate which is implied by justifications which demonstrate a mere token nod in the direction of integrity.

A close friend of mine recently handed me the papers (dating back to 2007) relating to advice given him by a leading IFA firm in Cardiff.  He had gone there for help in relation to mortgage and related debts, and had been sold a complete package of new financial arrangements.

These included, amongst other things; an offset mortgage with a new lender when his existing lender would have done just as well; the consolidation of unsecured debts onto a secured basis; capital-raising without any real prospect of repayment; an interest-only loan where the only (token) repayments were invested in an equity ISA.  And all this with a maximum possible term of 13 years, but with a strong possibility of significantly less time than that over which to rectify the damage.

The suitability report given to my friend did, of course, include all the requisite risk-warnings - but to have taken them seriously you would have needed to ignore all the advice.  One was conscious that the advice process involved exchanging one set of financial products for another set, but without any real improvement to one's financial circumstances.  The only definable benefit from all this work was a modest improvement to monthly cashflow - and even on this point, no real advice had been given to help my friend translate that into a quantifiable longer-term benefit.  The linking of an interest-only, offset mortgage to a regular-savings equity ISA appeared gung-ho in the extreme.  But never mind, because the advice was compliant - all the risk-warnings were present!! 

Angry?  You bet - I spent my day off working on the analysis and getting more and more angry about the degree of risk to my friend's financial wellbeing that this IFA firm had so casually (but very compliantly) engineered.  It struck me that, even if this had been advice given to a complete stranger and not to my best friend, this is the worst kind of deceit - where thinly-disguised product-churning is foisted upon the public as 'independent financial advice'.  Now that is worth getting angry about - how many others do you think there might be out there who would benefit from your services in sorting similar messes out?