Another Saturday and another round of exposing unacceptable behaviour in the financial services industry.
Today we publish three reports, all of which again show Alexander Forbes in a poor light.
I think the Alexander Forbes fiasco is now reaching the stage where the Financial Services Board (FSB) needs to appoint its own investigative team to go in and find out exactly what has happened at the company.
Alexander Forbes, in my view, has not shown a public commitment to tell the whole truth.
Too often it has attempted to play down that which later is proved to be a fact.
Week after week, since we published the initial exposé on bulking, we have received a steady stream of leaked documents about the happenings at Alexander Forbes.
Alexander Forbes has also consistently refused to answer our questions while attempting to discredit Personal Finance and myself.
Incidentally, all the reports that we have published have all been referred to Alexander Forbes to give the company ample time to comment on each story before publication.
There are also some people, including senior executives at Alexander Forbes, who are claiming that we are conducting a vendetta against Alexander Forbes.
This is simply not true.
We have one objective and that is the protection of you as a consumer of financial products.
It is clearly in the public interest to reveal what has happened in the company which administers 950 retirement funds and is the largest retirement funds administrator in South Africa.
It also has a say in hundreds of other retirement funds through one or more of the many retirement fund services it offers.
Many hundreds of thousands of people have their retirement savings affected in one way or another by Alexander Forbes.
The volume of information that we are receiving about Alexander Forbes also indicates that there are people who do not like what has happened at the company and who clearly do not trust the investigation that Alexander Forbes is conducting into its past activities, even though the investigation is being conducted by two outside companies. The investigators are auditors Ernst & Young and attorneys Deneys Reitz.
I have no reason to doubt that the two companies will not do a thorough job, particularly as there is a very bright spotlight on Alexander Forbes.
Alexander Forbes is not the only company guilty of excesses.
There are others - the names of which will be revealed by the FSB investigation into bulking.
What worries me is that people made the decisions to put these unacceptable practices into place and then maintain them.
The question must be asked: who were and are these people?
It is time that these people are named and, where appropriate, action should be taken against them or they should be sued in a civil court in cases where they are found to have made inappropriate and obscene amounts of money at the expense of retirement fund members.
And where they are shown to have been incompetent, they should be driven out of whatever profession they are in.
The people concerned are mainly lawyers, accountants and actuaries. They are professionals who we should be able to trust.
However, too many of them do not warrant our trust. Fortunately, the majority of the people in these three professions can tell right from wrong.
Often when people who can't tell the difference or really could not care about what is right or wrong, are caught out doing the unacceptable (not necessarily an illegal act)
their response is: "Oh, it is common industry practice".
This excuse is even used when a company such as Alexander Forbes initiates the unacceptable "common industry practice".
Two weeks ago, we exposed how Alexander Forbes pays its own retirement fund consultants bonuses based on how much business they manage to direct towards its subsidiary companies, such as asset multi-manager Investment Solutions.
Two truly independent retirement fund consultant companies have since confirmed to me that they were approached by Alexander Forbes/Investment Solutions to direct the assets of the retirement funds to which they consult, into Investment Solutions. The reward for this would have been 0.5 percent of the value of the assets.
This is absolutely unacceptable. Consultants should only be rewarded by the retirement funds they advise.
When these ethical consultant firms challenged the offer of the money, they were told it was "common industry practice". All I can say is that it is very "common", in the unkind sense of the word.
I also hear that some trustees are being taken in by some of the Alexander Forbes propaganda that funds have not been disadvantaged because Alexander Forbes and its subsidiaries were entitled to the profits that are taken off at nearly every point.
This is simply not so.
The trustees of your fund have a fiduciary duty, an obligation, to act in the best interests of the fund.
It does not matter whether the service provider is Alexander Forbes or anyone else.
Your trustees must be able to account to you about every fee, cost or charge that is levelled against your retirement savings.
You should demand that they do so. After all, it is the standard of living that you will have in retirement that will be affected.
In the end, every little reduction in the costs to administering your fund adds up to a lot of money saved for your retirement.