Moral redundancy in financial consultancy

[July 13 2012]

If businesses of the world were to be categorized into taxonomies of the animal kingdom, there is a new breed of financial consultancy which would surely rank with the mosquitoes. Parasitic in nature, encounters with these companies are often merely irritating, but just as malaria-carrying culicids can prove fatal to your health, dealings with these companies can occasionally have a similar effect on your finances.

These Financial Consultancies seek to sell investment packages to high earners living all over the world, preferably rich English-speaking Expats. Their employees are poorly qualified to advise on financial matters, and try to aggressively persuade potential clients to make badly thought through investments. In their hunt for commission, they damage the reputation of legitimate financial advisors and ultimately put themselves above the customer. 

The word “consultancy” would suggest that people actively seek out their advise and the services they supply. In reality new customers are not forthcoming and need to be sought out. This is most often achieved by trawling through social networking sites and harvesting the names of wealthy-seeming locals or British and American expats with attractive liquid assets.

Following this, a frenzy of cold calling begins in which men and women of assumed high net worth are harassed at their places of work. When the victim of a call politely expresses their lack of interest the caller is prepared with a list of responses to any objections to the pitch. Objections may be perfectly valid, but employees are in effect told that “the customer is always wrong”. If a “lead” asks where their contact details were obtained, they will be fed the lie that their name was willingly offered up by a friend or colleague. Callers will try their best to keep a potential client on the phone until a meeting with a consultant can be made.

The motivation to arrange these meetings is high, because the only way anybody in the company sees a commission is if the consultant meets with a client and manages to close a deal, relieving him of large quantities of money. If necessary, consultants are willing to drive for hours outside of their base city to do this. Ultimately, it does not matter if the product being sold is bad for the individual, and it often is; once the deal has been made, the customer is largely forgotten about. The commission has been taken.

With regard to customer satisfaction, a brief internet search of complaints will furnish you with all you need to know. Searching a company name reveals a constantly updating stream of anger and bile from past clients. Hundreds of testimonials tell disquieting stories of customers losing their pensions as a result of calamitous financial advice.

If you are searching for work there is also a danger they might recruit you. Companies such as these only have an annual employee retention of 10%, meaning they are constantly searching for anything with a pulse to man the phones. The lack of loyalty is unsurprising, given the stress involved in harassing people with no promise of a pay package at the end of it all.

Ultimately, It is important that one is able to recognize the hallmarks of these companies in order to avoid them. Although what they are doing is morally bankrupt, it is not illegal. The only way they can be combatted is through widespread awareness of their ongoing business malpractice.

Canada’s Little Mosque on the Prairie

Access to the Luxembourg-sized military training ground of BATUS, on the great plains of Canada is normally fairly restricted. It’s a place every single British soldier must go before being sent to Afghanistan. In short, it is a vast training facility where soldiers undergo long periods in the wilderness, live fire training and even come into contact with genuine Afghans, posing as either insurgents or civilians.  

Somewhere out in the unending vastness of the great plains, is a very small village called Hettar which is situated in the fictional country of Pokharistan. It is a place which has been made to look and feel almost exactly like a small Afghan settlement, complete with a Mosque, Bazaar and fresh-water well. Each summer a group of about 20 or 30 Afghan ex-pats are employed to fill the settlement and live there during the period of time it takes to train a battle group. It a job which pays well, though it comes with its drawbacks; often they are woken in the twilight hours, by large, heavily armed men, crashing into their houses to perform routine searches. Merely one aspect of the high-tempo, highly realistic training exercises.

Today, the head brass decided to let a large group of military families into BATUS. The group was to dress up and pose as Afghans for the day. The small population of resident Afghan ex-pats needed to be bulked out to make the trainees’ experience of patrolling  the village seem more realistic.

We were initially briefed by several echelons of military staff, who prepared us for what seemed like a very robust experience. The 24 men and women comprising our group, piled into a car park which lay in front of the open prairie. The men were given a selection of hats, scarves, breeches, shirts and waistcoats and the women, a single, black, nylon Burka. (Two of our group can be seen below.)

The clothes were extremely unwieldy and uncomfortable in the hot summer sun. Once dressed, we all piled onto a big yellow bus and embarked to Hettar.

We arrived about half a kilometer away from the village, from where a domed Mosque was clearly visible. Some of the group was herded into a smaller vehicle, which had been dubbed the 'Jingly Bus' (below). The rest of us trudged into the village on foot.

Inside the village It was difficult to believe we were still in Canada; our surroundings were extremely realistic. As we walked into the village we passed  concrete fortifications, foreign looking detritus and arabic graffiti daubed upon mud houses. Before long we were in the village square, where the bustling market place was situated. The stalls had a mixture of arabic and english signs above them. Some retailer names I can recall were 'Farouk's Fancy Department' selling unappetising looking plastic vegetables, 'Ahmed's Appliances' selling knackered lawnmowers, power-tools and bicycles and one stall called 'Al Malik and Sons Electrics ltd.', (below) 

One stall in particular was packed full of Afghan ex-pats and British posers alike, due to the fact it was the only stall selling real food instead the plastic toy meat and veg in all the others. Several Afghans were cooking up a storm of naan breads and kebabs and handing them around, proudly showing off samples of their native cuisine.

Three of the older Afghans stopped my mother in her tracks for some reason, probably because she was walking in front of her husband, a calamitous faux pas in Kabul. It took me a while to realise it was actually her under the feature-obliterating burka, but when I did I took the opportunity to go over and engage the the Afghans in conversation. 

It was interesting to hear that they remembered Afghanistan in the 1980s when the Russians were there. One of them claimed to have gone to University in Moscow and had spent 10 years there. He had been a communist ally to the Russians fighting against the Mujahedin. At any rate I was able to converse in Russian with them for a while. For some of them it seemed to come easier to them than English, however conversation topics were fairly limited; Russian girls seemed to be their main area of expertise.

This was the day a British general was coming to have a look at the village; as close to Afghanistan as the British military probably puts a general. When he arrived all of the Afghanis suddenly snapped into action and put their best acting skills into play, quickly manning all the market stalls, yelling and selling their pretend wears. 

The British pretend-Afghans merely shuffled around the market, shopping for mock-foodstuffs with the mock-currency they had been given. An Afghan woman tried to give me an impromptu language lesson in Parsi. She told me the names for the various synthetic root vegetables on display, but told me that I was a bad boy for not being able to understand her when she gabbled quickly at me in her native language. I politely handed her some of the Pokharistani dollars, took a plastic melon out of her basket and moved away awkwardly, trying to escape, only to be confronted by man even more loquacious than the woman had been. He forced me to haggle with him over some artichokes, a vegetable, which he and all of his friends admitted to me they did not recognise. 

Meanwhile a young man was herding eight or so chickens through the Bazaar, but struggled to coax them away from a mud bath which they seemed to be enjoying. He told us that he had tried to sharpen their talons to try and get them to fight, but it hadn't worked because they were 'Canadian' chickens and were therefore far too friendly to each other to fight to the death. Illegal as cock-fighting is in Canada, I don't exactly know what influence the Canadian Mounties had here.

I had wondered if we were going to be mock-attacked by one of the battle groups and although we weren't, there was a great deal of military activity; tanks rolled noisily around the settlement and troops skulked menacingly past from time to time. Soldiers could be seen surveying the village from the tops of buildings and every now and again the mock-police force would stroll over and harass some of the vendors in the market place. I couldn't help but feel a little on edge, despite the obvious lack of danger.

The general didn't stay for long and we too were soon taken back to the bus, for another long and uncomfortable journey home.

For us, Hettar was kind of like 'War Zoo'. It all looked real but came without any of the nasty high-risk-of-death factor which is a compulsory garnish to any journey to the war-torn Islamic republic of Afghanistan. Meeting the Afghans was a truly fascinating experience. It gave a tiny glimpse into a part of the world which our governments have decided to treat as collateral in the mission to rid the west of terror. Shaking hands and discussing lighthearted subjects with people, most of my fellow countrymen might write-off as 'the enemy' had a sort of pathos to it, the likes of which I rarely experience.

Ghosts Haunt Hohne

[5 July 2010] last updated 20 August 2012

To be 12 years old and to live as I did in Hohne, Germany, a former Wehrmacht Panzer Base, overlooking the site of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, is to live in a Petri dish, cultivating a fetish for the Second World War. It seems shameful to me that after almost seventy years of peace, this brief period of history should still spring to mind ahead of all other things when the word Germany is uttered. But as a young boy living where I did, one might forgive me for having a fixation with the Nazis and letting my imagination wander.

Hohne, Germany

The holocaust is somewhat drummed into us from an early age, so the history is known well enough not to require any background to this camp's existence. 

It goes without saying, that Hohne, has a fairly gruesome past. It was the death place of Anne Frank and over 50,000 others, whom the Third Reich had deemed unfit for Germany, and was once home to some of the very cruellest individuals of the last century. 

I do not believe in Ghosts, but this blog entry contains the my own personal contribution to the often risible canon of ghost stories from Bergen-Hohne. 

No matter how sceptical one might be toward the supernatural, the notion of living in such close proximity to a place of profound human suffering, is  undoubtedly an unpleasant one and certainly enough to get the imagination of a young boy fired.

Allow me to set the scene. Bergen-Hohne, in Northern Germany, is built on the edge a vast forest near to the historic market town of Celle. During my residence, the base belonged to the British military. Accommodation on the site consists of large buildings divided into apartments. The apartments were spacious and dark generally comprising of one very long corridor, with rooms branching off either side. These flats were once occupied by the Wehrmacht, but after they were expelled, the sick and dying from the adjacent concentration camp took up residence. 

On site, there is an enormous abandoned hospital where nobody ever goes; an obvious location for any malevolent spirits looking to take up residence. It remains one of the only buildings left in Germany with a Swastika above the front entrance, and can be found towards the back of the base, on the other side of a line of trees which separated it from the plot occupied by my apartment building; a tad too close for comfort.

Wehrmacht Hospital, now abandoned

Other points of interest include the Roundhouse. This building was once the German Officer’s Mess, where evening functions would be held. It too has Nazi effigies above its front door but the swastikas have since been obliterated. One of the cellars of the Roundhouse even remains unopened, due to the sensitivity of what lies within.

Tucked away within the furthest recesses of the camp, not far from the old hospital is a building with a very peculiar feature. This building once bore a Nazi eagle plaque of its own above the front door but, naturally, it has since been torn down. Now however, a mouldy smear in the shadowy shape an eagle remains, highly visible to passers-by. As you would expect, attempts have been made since the end of the war to scrub and paint over the garish blemish, but inexplicably, its gradual return can be guaranteed mere weeks after treatment has been applied. When I last saw it, it was vividly eldritch; as though the plaque had only just been removed.

Ghost stories aren’t hard to stumble upon in Hohne; there were a lot of bored, stay-at-home wives, alone while their husbands were off fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, who passed around the most absurd stories.

I heard tall tales of furniture levitating around the room, stories of families coming home to find all of the furniture had vanished completely, there was even one anecdote of a family that had run, shrieking, from their home, having seen a pair of Hassidic Jews standing in their hallway, staring sullenly into oblivion. There were some apartment buildings which were said to stand permanently vacant because families could only spent several weeks in them, before being frightened into leaving. It all seemed fairly ridiculous to me, even as a 12 year old boy.

My family's experiences, odd though they were, were subtler than the stories of flying coffee tables, told by some. 

Simply being left alone in the flat for an afternoon was enough to make your skin crawl. Perhaps it was the diabolical feng-shui of the apartment's layout, or the knowledge of who had lived there before me, but sitting by myself in our apartment never failed to fill me with a powerful sense of dread. I would end up curling up into a ball on my bedroom windowsill in unexplainable fear and wait motionless for hours for people to return.

My bedroom had a lot to yield to the budding horror junky. My lasting memory of that room, was of waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of my brother crying. We shared a room then (such was our sacrifice for a dining room) and through the darkness one night was audible his distressed sobs. He must have been 9 or 10 and I, 11 or 12. I called to him to ask him what was the matter. His reply to me was shaky; 

“I can feel someone touching my face," he whimpered, "its like a hand… like a rough hand.” 

I froze with terror. All of the hairs on my arms and neck stood up. Very stiffly, I reached out for the lamp and switched it on. To my relief, the light revealed no unsolicited, ghostly visitors. I reassured him that he was probably imagining it all, and although he didn’t seem at all comforted by my words, I turned the light off and went swiftly back to sleep. Half an hour later I was woken again in the same way. I inquired once more to my clearly distressed brother and was given much the same answer explanation. What could I do? There was no one else in the room, it had to be nightmares or hallucinations. This repeated itself several times until morning. How we largely forgot about this the next day, I do not know. It was a genuinely traumatic night for two young boys to endure.

There were other little instances which kept us on edge. Two of my Aunts once came to stay for a while. My brother and I were back at school in England, so our aunts used the room we had left vacant. One of my Aunts maintains that she experienced a very similar sensation to my brother, saying the covers of the bed had been pulled up around her neck as she settled into bed. Although she is Irish and therefore inherently prone to superstition; she was unaware of my brother’s experience and could not have corroborated hers with him.

On top of this, there was my brother's bizarre and unexplained monthly midnight vomiting sessions, bodiless footsteps were occasionally heard throughout the building, dead bats often had a habit of turning up on our bathroom windowsills and there was even a one off spontaneous light-bulb explosion whilst I was down in the cellar. All of it made for a fairly interesting tenure. 

If the Jewish mass graves and Albert Speer-esque architecture weren't enough, the seeming supernatural activity was more than enough to sap the joy from our home life.