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When

Wednesday, December 8th from 6pm to 8pm UK time"

Where

Online symposium via Zoom.

Format

There'll be a great line-up of speakers plus ample scope for discussion and debate.

Why you should attend

Listen to and discuss what must be one of the most alarming cases of catastrophic regulatory failure by the Financial Conduct Authority, ever. You’ll be free to form your own opinion about what the FCA did, and what it seems they then did to cover up their tracks.

Big questions need to be asked about this tragic case; in particular, about whether the FCA failed to maintain basic standards of integrity at the very top of the organisation; and whether any of the principles of conduct in public office have been broken; and if so, by whom.

Furthermore, we’ll be exploring how many Connaught Income Series 1 investors lost large amounts of money as a consequence of the FCA ignoring evidence given to them by a whistleblower with off-the-scale credibility – the innocent Chief Executive Officer of an organisation that was systematically stealing from investors.

Decide for yourself whether the FCA properly protected the interests of a whistleblower; or whether George Patellis was treated appallingly, and had his life severely damaged by the FCA.

In our opinion, what happened to George Patellis is the single most astonishing catastrophic regulatory case we’ve learned about since the Transparency Task Force started way back in 2015.

But it’s even worse than that, because all the evidence we have seen, from George’s case and many others, indicates that it’s part of a broader pattern of systemic abuse of whistleblowers by the FCA – that’s a strong statement to make – we have thought carefully about those words and we believe them to be true.

In general terms, the pattern we see is that the extent of the abuse and the consequences for whistleblowers are proportionate to the extent of the FCA’s exposure to that being disclosed by the whistleblower.

George Patellis was unfortunate to have uncovered evidence that exposed the FSA/FCA to an altogether other degree, potentially criminally so. It seems therefore that there has been nothing the FSA/FCA were not prepared to do to George Patellis to protect themselves, including destroying George, his reputation and all of the consequences that the FCA knew would come with that.

Other whistleblowers have been abused by way of ’non-action’ by the FCA, others by a degree of dishonesty or other means.

Indeed, The Protect Silence in the City 2 study found that 70% of all bank and financial firm whistleblowers since 2016 had been subject to detriment. Yet in that same time period, as far as we can tell, the FCA has failed to punish, or issue any notice to, any firm for abuse of, or detriment to, whistleblowers, even when it is clear that they were aware of it.

It is our belief that those two stats cannot co-exist unless there is catastrophic regulatory failure and/or dishonesty.