I never received a meaningful explanation of the poor performance either from the bank or the company running the fund.
As a result of my complaint, I received a phone call from the branch manager, who wanted to arrange a meeting with me and the adviser to discuss the complaint. I agreed with considerable and well-justified trepidation.
The first thing I was told by the adviser was that they were “well prepared”.
They attempted to turn things around by digging up a couple of minor but entirely justified complaints I had needed to make in the past.
This notorious fishing expedition was intended to discredit me somehow and divert from the real issues.
I managed to steer the dialogue back to my complaint, but they admitted nothing.
After a while, the adviser had to leave, but not before having a real go at me for complaining, and getting far too close for comfort, especially in that Covid period.
The manager conceded that the behaviour of his colleague was inappropriate and unprofessional, but advised me to drop the complaint, because “I hadn’t lost money and compensation could not be paid for lost gains”.
He also said that without a lawyer, nothing would happen, and he was right about the latter point, but not the former.
On arriving home, it took me all of five minutes to confirm that the German Civil Code paragraph 252 states explicitly that someone who has lost profits in such a situation is indeed entitled to compensation.
I wrote to him, pointed out this and other salient issues, but received only a short and rather unpleasant fob off.
I pursued the matter further with the bank, but the issue was passed onto two people in the inappropriately named quality control section, whose real job was clearly also to admit nothing, offer nothing and explain nothing (properly).
Their main defence was that at the time I was “indecisive”. The truth was that their communication was so poor that it took months to figure out what was going on, and when I then made my desire to get immediately back into the rapidly rising stock market, the adviser failed to comply, in the hope of making a fresh sale.
Interestingly, I then spoke to a lawyer who coincidentally had worked for a while at the bank in question. He informed me that when complaints and compensation were discussed, it never had anything to do with ethics or fairness, but merely whether they thought they could get away with mismanaging the complaint.
The quantum of damages was not sufficiently high to justify suing, given the cost, stress and inevitable risk involved. The last resort was thus the bank’s so-called mediation center (Schlichtungstelle).
