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UK regulator rejects complaints it ‘failed to actʼ on warnings about Blackmore Bond
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February 6, 2025
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has rejected complaints from 26 investors in Blackmore Bond that it failed to act on warnings about the firmʼs unregulated mini-bonds. Blackmore collapsed in April 2020 leaving investors owed £47 million.
In a statement, the FCA said it had “carefully considered the complaints and decided not to uphold them” and that it “handled intelligence received about the firm appropriately”.
FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi told the Treasury Committee in December 2022 that “human error” meant that in 2017 the regulator did not share all the intelligence it had received on Blackmore with the City of London Police.
Asked how today’s statement was consistent with the 2022 letter, the FCA said its independent complaints team — an internal unit – looked at a wide range of evidence to examine its actions, some of which they were unable to disclose. The complaints team found that the regulator handled intelligence “appropriately”, including its sharing of information with other agencies, the FCA said.
Multi-year weight
The announcement today comes 14 months after Therese Chambers, joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, wrote to the Treasury Committee saying the regulator would resolve the 26 outstanding complaints — on hold since June 2021 — “as soon as practicable”.
The FCA had paused the complaints while it carried out an investigation into the regulated firms NCM Fund Services (NCM) and Northern Provident Investments (NPI), which had both approved financial promotions of the bonds.
Chambersʼ letter said the FCA spent 7,330 hours reviewing more than 8,000 documents but did not find evidence of “sufficiently serious breaches relating to their approval of the financial promotions to justify taking enforcement action against either firm”.
Today the FCA said because it had taken so long to review the complaints, it would make a payment of between £150 and £250 to each of the 26 individuals.