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Dear Friend of GATA and Gold (and
Silver):
The difficult attempt of a
cancer-stricken Toronto woman to exchange her Scotiabank
silver certificates for real metal, witnessed last week by a writer for the
Globe and Mail, whose account of the matter is appended, recalls the
difficult attempt of Harvey and Lenny Organ to do the same thing with the
same bank. (See http://www.gata.org/node/8513.) The bank's mistreatment of the Toronto woman is
so outrageous that perhaps some of those who were skeptics of the Organs'
story will begin to wonder if there isn't after all really a bullion banking
policy to discourage buyers from taking possession of their metal precisely
because the banks are selling far more claims to metal than they have actual
metal.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
An
Unkind Complicatedness
By Christie Blatchford
The Globe and Mail, Toronto
Saturday, July 17, 2010
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/christie-blatchford/an-unki...
In the end, nothing else would do for Scotiabank but that Amar Patel
-- 73 years old, bald from chemotherapy, in the throes of metastatic breast
cancer -- should drag her aching bones down to the bank's head office in
downtown Toronto.
The trip from her airy apartment above
the Indian Rice Factory, the landmark restaurant she founded in 1970 and has
run ever since, was an agony of no fewer than five transfers -- from the
hospital bed in her living room to a commode, from commode to the chair lift
for the first set of stairs, from that chair to the next chair lift for the
second set, from that chair to a walker, from walker to the car.
This exercise took 59 minutes and the
best efforts of her son Aman, daughter-in-law Deepa, and restaurant employee Chandan
Sindhwal.
I should note that despite her illness
and pain, Mrs. Patel, who hadn't been out of the apartment for almost two
months, was gracious, beautiful in a red-striped caftan, and, but for
occasional moans when the car hit a rough patch of road, remarkably
uncomplaining.
All she wanted was to do was take
delivery of the silver the bank was holding for her in the form of the
certificates she’d bought decades earlier.
It was, or ought to have been, an
uncomplicated transaction.
Another major financial institution, TD
Bank, managed to handle the same transaction within a couple of days, and
delivered the bullion to Mrs. Patel's local branch for pickup.
By this Thursday, Mrs. Patel had done
the following to obtain Scotiabank's agreement to
give her what is rightfully hers:
In early March, Aman,
a Toronto criminal lawyer, had attended the downtown headquarters to explain
his mom’s situation. He suggested that either a bank official go to her
apartment to witness her signature (he even offered to pick up and drive back
the official) or consider meeting his mother in the car outside the bank to
save her a bit of the journey: Both requests were rejected.
On March 17, Aman
faxed the silver certificates to his mom's local Scotiabank
branch and then drove his mother there; they were advised she would have to
attend the King/Bay office downtown.
For a time, Mrs. Patel gave up; she was
hoping she could tackle it in a few weeks or months, when she was better and
had her strength back.
When that didn't happen, she hired a Bay
Street lawyer and, through him, signed a power of attorney appointing Aman as her attorney.
In early July, Scotiabank
asked first to "pre-inspect" the power of attorney, then demanded
the original; then pronounced it unacceptable because it wasn't sealed; then
insisted that a notarized copy, with covering letter from the lawyer, be produced;
finally, the notarized POA had to be submitted to the home branch, then the
bank's legal department.
Even with these various approvals
finally in place, Aman was told (being a lawyer, he
has notes of all these conversations and e-mails) that the bank could still
deny the transaction if it was deemed not to be in Mrs. Patel's "best
interest."
So she hired another lawyer, this time
to help her get what was hers.
Then the bank said it had to decide if
the transaction was to be for the benefit of the attorney, from a business
point of view. In other words, Scotiabank would
decide if the transaction made business sense -- not Mrs. Patel, or her
lawyer, or Aman, who had her power of attorney.
This Thursday, having heard nothing from
the bank about whether it would honour the
now-approved and vetted POA, Aman called and got
Judy McBride, the head of customer service at King and Bay Streets. She told
him the bank would not honour the POA and that Mrs.
Patel had to come down in person.
Aman again explained how weak his mother
was, to no avail.
That afternoon, Aman,
his wife and Chandan managed to carry out the five
transfers and get Mrs. Patel in the car.
Once they arrived downtown, Aman went in to ask, one last time, if Scotiabank would at least dispatch people outside to do
the signing in the car. Absolutely not, came the
answer.
They got Mrs. Patel into the commode
chair and into the lovely, high-ceilinged headquarters with its polished
marble floors they went.
Ms. McBride asked a number of questions,
in my presence. Among them: "Do you understand what this transaction is
that is taking place? We're taking your certificates and giving you the
actual bullion? Why would you want to do that? It's more difficult for you to
cart around."
At this point, Aman's
seemingly endless store of patience was exhausted and he said -- mildly, I
thought, in the circumstances -- "That's none of your business."
Ms. McBride said that it was, that
"simply putting a POA in place doesn't give carte blanche," that
the bank had a responsibility too, and asked Mrs. Patel, "Why would you
need the physical metal?"
Ms. McBride said the bank "reserves
a right to ask questions," because, she said, "We need a comfort
level."
Bank spokesman Joe Konecny
denied the bank ever insisted Mrs. Patel had to come in person, said they
were "willing to act" on the POA, but that "a heightened level
of due diligence was required for a number of reasons," among them,
bizarrely, that the transaction wasn't initiated at her home branch, although
that branch had directed her downtown.
In any case, after about an hour, Mrs.
Patel finally got her silver.
But it must have been a mortifying
experience for this very dignified woman to make such a trip in her
bedclothes, and the whole thing struck me as a profoundly condescending and
arbitrary intrusion of bank functionaries into Mrs. Patel's and her family's
business. And what if her son wasn't a lawyer who knew how to fight back?
What if she'd had a stroke and wasn’t able to sign the documents?
If she wanted to buy crack cocaine with
that silver, or sleep with it at her side, that's her call, because it
belongs to her, not the bank. The bully-boy functionaries might want to find
a comfort level around that notion.
Chris
Powell
Secretary / Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee
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