By Steve Conley, Academy of Life Planning
The Great Unspoken Truth
Across decades of financial scandals—Post Office Horizon, Hillsborough, Watergate-in-miniature cases from Cornwall to Malta—one truth repeats itself: the institutions meant to protect us too often protect themselves.
From QROPS pension victims to local government pension losses, the story remains the same. Victims face a wall of silence, while regulators, auditors, and financial institutions circle their wagons. When accountability is required, they conduct a review. When justice is demanded, they form a committee. When truth emerges, they regulate each other’s silence.
The Evidence in Plain Sight
In 2024, Paul Birch wrote to the FCA’s CEO, Nikhil Rathi, asking a simple question:
“Is PwC Global, headquartered in London, regulated by the FCA?”
No answer ever came.
Instead, the email—copied to dozens of agencies across the UK, Malta, the Isle of Man, Australia, and the United States—laid bare a network of institutional complacency. PwC member firms, implicated in multiple QROPS scandals, had audited companies later proven to have enabled fraud and money laundering. Yet regulators stood idle, even as the same firms were fined elsewhere for similar misconduct.
Meanwhile, the FCA boasted of collaboration with U.S. and Australian agencies, while refusing to cooperate with Malta and the Isle of Man—two of the jurisdictions most central to the QROPS crisis.
“The FCA assists ASIC and the SEC,” Paul wrote, “but turns a blind eye to crimes on its own doorstep.”
“We Will Not Be Commenting Further”
In late 2025, pension victim Graham Crompton wrote repeatedly to Utmost International and the Isle of Man Financial Services Authority. He provided detailed evidence: forged signatures, missing cancellation rights, advisers operating without regulation or indemnity, and breaches of anti-money-laundering law.
The reply?
“We will not be commenting further on the concerns you have raised.”
That single sentence captures the rot at the heart of modern regulation. It’s not simply failure—it’s refusal. It’s the institutionalised decision to not know, to not act, and to not care.
When Whistleblowers Become Witnesses
Ian Stocks, another victim, wrote that “HM Government is constantly let down by regulators that either favour their own paying members’ commercial activities or are so used to tick-box exercises that they lack real-life experience of resolving industrial-scale abuse.”
His point cuts to the core: the watchdogs have become consultancy firms, managing perception rather than enforcing justice. The same professional networks that audit the fraudsters also advise the regulators who are meant to prosecute them.
In this ecosystem, every scandal is treated as a “learning experience.” No one is punished. No one is struck off. The lesson is never learned.
The Global Symptom of a Captured System
From PwC’s role in the QROPS, BRITE, and Utmost scandals to the Maltese government’s inaction in the face of documented corruption, a pattern emerges:
- The same firms appear across continents.
- The same regulators claim jurisdictional limits.
- The same victims are left bankrupt, bereaved, or broken.
And yet, when foreign authorities act—such as Australia’s Federal Court ordering BRITE Advisors wound up “on just and equitable grounds”—the UK’s institutions fall conspicuously silent.
A System That Cannot Regulate Itself
As Andrew Bailey once said during his time as FCA CEO:
“Any organisation that prioritises being within the rules rather than doing the right thing will not stand up to scrutiny for long.”
The irony, as Paul noted, is that the FCA itself has not acted within its own rules. It now stands precisely where Bailey warned against—defensive, opaque, and unaccountable.
When the Public Becomes the Regulator
The collective correspondence of Paul Birch, Graham Crompton, Ian Stocks, and their peers reads like the minutes of a citizen-led truth commission. These are ordinary people doing the work of forensic auditors, investigative journalists, and prosecutors—because those paid to do so have abdicated their duty.
That is what Get SAFE and the wider citizen-investigator movement now represent: the rise of public oversight in a captured system. When state institutions fail to protect the people, the people become the institution of last resort.
The Way Forward
Transparency will not be restored by the same bodies that destroyed it. Real accountability begins with citizen investigators, ethical journalists, and communities uniting to document truth, preserve evidence, and force justice through public visibility.
The task is enormous, but history shows that every corrupt structure eventually collapses under the weight of its own concealment. Hillsborough, Post Office Horizon, and now the offshore pension frauds—each is part of the same continuum.
It ends when silence ends.
Call to Action:
If you’ve lost faith in the system, don’t disengage—organise.
Join the Get SAFE movement to help victims become investigators and citizens become regulators. Because when institutions fail the public, the public must hold the institutions to account.
🔗 www.aolp.info/getsafe
🕊️ Replacing extraction with empowerment.
Prepared by Steve Conley, Academy of Life Planning / Get SAFE Initiative
In partnership with the Transparency Task Force — 2025
Steve Conley, BSc FCII APFS
Holistic Wealth Planner, Chartered Financial Planner & Chartered Insurer
Founder, Academy of Life Planning | Get SAFE | M-POWER
Advisory Group Member, Transparency Task Force
steve.conley@aolp.co.uk | www.aolp.info | +44 (0)7850 102070
Academy of Life Planning 