SIB plans checklist to help avoid bad advice

THE Securities and Investments Board, the senior financial regulator, will publish a checklist later this month to help investors to avoid being wrongly advised by personal pensions salesmen.

This is one of the SIB's measures, set out yesterday, to get to grips with the personal pensions transfer scandal. It is feared thousands of people may have been wrongly advised to switch their benefits from an occupational pension scheme to a personal plan.

By the end of April, the SIB will tell the life insurers which categories of pension transfer business they must reconsider as a matter of priority.

Any disadvantaged investors will have to be compensated according to a blueprint for remedies that the SIB will publish in July.

Meanwhile, Andrew Large, the SIB chairman, has told BBC's Panorama programme that the extent of damage caused by personal pension transfers has been exaggerated.

Yesterday's interim report said the initial study by KPMG Peat Marwick 'cannot be used to estimate the cost of harm to investors. All present quantifications . . . are based on conjecture.'

Some estimates of the compensation costs have ranged as high as pounds 1bn.