Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Trust and integrity

Hi Mr. Tan
Heard about this, but don't know how true is the report. There is a brokerage remiser whose clients defaulted on $1m stock losses, remiser could not pay, so his firm sued him for $2m. The incident happened during the recent financial crisis 2008.

This means the poor remiser has to pay $1m in interests within a span of two years. Owing to lack of consumer protection here in Singapore, this means we have to scrutinize all contracts with a fine comb, at the bottom in small wordings, there may be predatory terms that would bound us unfairly. A warning to all property mortgagees on mortgage loans, with its complicated 
tructured loans, now we may have to engage lawyers to assess them, better pay to have peace of mind, we don't want to be ridiculed for not going in with eyes open, should something untoward happens. We are living in a world where trust and integrity have gone to the dogs.


My views
I think that interest may take up 10% to 20% but the rest of the money is for paying legal fees. Lawyers can be very, very expensive. The court should impose some cap on the legal fees in such matters. It cannot be "charge as they like".