A public inquiry into Dixon Advisory is essential, according to the FAAA.
In a LinkedIn posting the association’s Phil Anderson says that with a potential cost to the financial advice profession of $135m for the CSLR “…our members are demanding to understand how this has got so out of control.”
Anderson writes that the answer is simple “…it is all about the one entity – Dixon Advisory, which has generated a total of 2,773 complaints to AFCA, more than five times the annual number of complaints for the entire advice profession and multiple hundreds of millions of dollars in client losses.”
Highlighting a paper the association has undertaken entitled The curious case of ASIC v’s Dixon Advisory and why an inquiry is needed Anderson says the question the FAAA wants to get to the bottom of is: how did things go so badly wrong?
“This is much more than just a few advisers providing poor advice. This is about an entire business that was focussed on heavily selling in-house investment products, and one in particularly (URF), that turned out to be deeply flawed.”
In the paper, the FAAA looks at the action that ASIC took against Dixon Advisory, on the basis of the documents that are publicly available, and the class action that was taken by Shine lawyers.
“These two matters were settled, without playing out in the courts and, as a result, we really do not have the answers that we are looking for.”
He says some of what was said and done in this process will surprise people.
“It is worth the read, however the inevitable conclusion is that the only way that we will really understand what happened, and who was responsible for this debacle, is with a public inquiry,” Anderson says.
Click here to read the full paper.
