Investors to apply collective pressure to ING

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A new pressure group of disgruntled ING investors has formed with the aim of extracting a full return of capital from the fund manager's distressed collateralised debt obligation (CDO) products.

Friday, January 30th 2009, 5:06AM

by David Chaplin

The ING/ANZ Frozen Funds Action Group has already attracted hundreds of investors stung by losses in ING's two CDO funds – the Diversified Yield Fund (DYF) and Regular Income Fund (RIF), according to spokesperson, Andrew Davidson. Davidson, who also runs the fair-trade food company Scarborough Fair, told Good Returns the action group – most of whom invested through ANZ advisers – wanted ING to return $1 per unit to every RIF and DYF investor.

“We think [the two funds] were mis-represented by ANZ and ING. We think a fair outcome would be a product recall, which a good responsible corporate would do,” he said.

While the majority of the investor action group members are applying for redress from ANZ through the Banking Ombudsman, Davidson said collectively they hope to apply further moral pressure to ING.

“As a group we can pull together a lot of common issues... and there is a lot of commonality in what people are saying about how the fund was represented to them as low risk,” he said.

The investor group was inspired by a similar project initiated by a number of financial planners but Davidson said investors wanted to make their case to ING separately from advisers. He said the group has already published a newsletter and received hundreds of contacts through the inganzfrozenfunds@gmail.com email address.

An ING spokesperson said the group had yet to receive any formal communication from the new investor action group.

ING revealed this week it would pay back to the RIF and DYF products any management fees that have accrued since the funds were frozen last March. As well, the group said it would return any trail fees to the funds that advisers did not want to collect.

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