Claimants against Rowanmoor Personal Pensions will have their patience tested yet again as it could take a while longer to get a decision from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
According to the lifeboat scheme, 1,500 claims are currently in the pipeline and each one will be determined on its own merit.
This is despite more than half of the claims coming from the Financial Ombudsman Service, which had ruled on a successful sample case as far back as January 2022.
Many of the claims are deemed similar in nature, containing self-invested personal pensions which are holding failed unregulated investments.
The FSCS said it currently takes up to 12 months for eight out of 10 pension claimants to receive their decision through the service.
But many Rowanmoor claimants have been waiting longer than that, after their provider collapsed on August 2022.
The FSCS has so far paid out £278,000 on 8 successful claims. Some 48 claims have been processed with 40 having been unsuccessful.
The FSCS has previously explained to FT Adviser that despite a lot of the claims coming from the Fos, it still needs to determine that Rowanmoor owes claimants a civil liability under the COMP rules before it can start to process any claims.
It said the tests it must apply to claims and the Financial Ombudsman Service applies to complaints were “very different”.
The Fos determines complaints based on whether it considers that regulated firms acted in a way which was ‘fair and reasonable’ in the circumstances.
The Fos does not decide complaints based on whether a firm owes a ‘civil liability’ to a complainant, which is the test that FSCS must apply.
The lifeboat scheme told FT Adviser there were a few reasons for claims having been rejected so far.
The majority were rejected because claims have been made in relation to activities/products not protected under the FSCS’s rules, with a few being duplicate claims or claims that have been withdrawn.
Rowanmoor - what happened?
In December 2023, the FSCS declared Sipp operator Rowanmoor Personal Pensions in default.
Rowanmoor collapsed in August 2022 under the weight of hundreds of complaints related to failed offshore investments in its Sipps.
These were then re-routed from the Fos to the FSCS, which has been investigating them since.
Some of those claims date back to 2019, and investors have previously told FT Adviser of the financial hardship they were facing due to the delays in settling their claims, with one investor who was nearing retirement saying he would have to sell his house to make ends meet.
In July, FT Adviser reported that claims against Rowanmoor could be delayed by half a year as the FSCS worked to finish its investigation.
Questions had been raised by many investors about the investigation, after the Fos had found in their favour in a sample case in 2022, which ultimately brought Rowanmoor to its knees.
But the FSCS assured claimants in May that it was not duplicating work already done by the ombudsman.
