I am one of the many pensioners who invested their hard-earned pension money in the La Valette Multi Manager Property Fund. I am the retired headmaster who founded San Miguel Special School for the disabled.

A friend who happened to be one of the senior wealth management advisers of BOV persuaded me. He placed a lot of emphasis on the stability and quality of the proposed investment’s underlying funds. I now bitterly regret taking his/the bank’s advice as my hope that this €20,000 investment would render me some extra return in my old age has foundered on the rocks, with only a quarter of the original investment remaining available for immediate encashment.

In the meantime, VFM as manager and yourself as custodian continue to be paid not only on that part of the fund, which is immediately encashable but also on the “side pocket” investment that cannot be encashed. These payments to VFM and BOV would not have been unfair if VFM as manager and BOV as custodian had performed their duties. As a matter of fact, VFM invested heavily in Belgravia funds that at the time of the investment already had a tainted reputation and today is a failed group with directors under arrest or on the wanted list.

Besides, VFM invested in nine underlying funds (including Belgravia but others as well) that clearly contravened the La Valette prospectus as these underlying funds had liabilities that exceeded the maximum allowed of 100 per cent of their net assets. And your bank, custodian and guardian of our funds, put our mind at rest on an annual basis with your custodian certificate confirming that investment restrictions had been adhered to!

To add insult to injury, it results that redemptions from the fund in the months immediately before the La Valette Property Fund was suspended amounted to more than €16 million, a massive amount in both absolute and relative terms when compared to the HSBC Property Fund. The investors of both the BOV and the HSBC Property Fund are drawn from the same Maltese population and simple logic would make one conclude that investment patterns in both funds would be the same and not altogether disproportional. This is the reason why the redemptions from the BOV fund stinks. The failure of your bank to give the monthly redemption statistics, the alleged indication that one of the fund’s directors also withdrew money, gives a lot of added weight to our suspicions.

A copy of this letter is being sent to the MFSA. I find it unacceptable that this authority, financed by our taxes, should take so long to investigate this fund when I believe it is only fair for John Citizen to expect that the MFSA, with the resources it has and with its regulatory powers, should have initiated the investigation itself without any prompting by La Valette investors making judicial protests.

I hope that the inevitable compensation that your bank and related companies must pay will be paid in time for me to enjoy, given that I am already 74 years old.

Albert Felice

MARSASCALA