Towry Law paid just £1 for Edward Jones

The whole business model in the UK was obviusly not working & not profitable. This happens in business but why oh why did the UK management allow this to go on for so long (10 yrs)? Issuing press releases in March advising mass recruitment of advisers, continuing to open branches, employing office administrators etc etc and this up until the last two months. It stinks of management not being able to recognise fundamental mistakes and hold their hands up and stop wasting peoples time and their company's money.

They were robbed!!

As we are always told - shares are cheap for a reason - it doesn't mean they are good value.

Should always buy quality, hold for the long term and diversify. ( The law according to Mr K but not Mr F)

as a client with my savings with edward jones, my adviser left a few months ago fearing for the companies future - he was right, it is my money, I want nothing to do with Towry Law

Now where do I begin, we were told this is our business, we were told we were here for good, we were told we had a job for life, we were told we had a 5yr plan to profit. Now we are told we have to reapply for our jobs, we cannot keep our clients??? after 5years of door knocking and making 25 calls a day,,,,,

Mr K and Mr (hey man how you doing) N sorry but you have let me and the whole country down, no wonder all the good advisers were leaving in their droves

I presume that seeing Towry Law has bought Edward Jones UK the likes of Tim Kirley etc will be moving across to Towry Law won't they? Or will they just scuttle back to the US and be given bonuses despite the fact they personally screwed up the lives of over 1000 people?! Having to be called by my BOA whilst on holiday (for the first time in 2 years) to be told the business has been sold is abysmal. The idiots are not fit to run a car boot stall let alone a company! Losing £5million a month and still telling staff how great a business model it is?!

I too feel we have been seriously mislead by the partners at EJ in recent months. I believe £1 is far too much for this debacle of a company.

Please keep an open mind regarding Towry Law

- you may receive a superior service.

Welcome to the dark world of EJ / TL - Advisors are now being bribed to lie to our clients 'look after them, give a good service, business as usual' blah blah blah. We will now pay you an average of the commisson of what you have earned in the last so many months.....

Make a £100 commission and we'll pay you a £1,000.

With no money in the EJ business (millions in debt remember) & TL not yet bought the company officially - then who exactly is paying for all the extra commission that will be paid??

Typical EJ Business model - lets throw good money after bad.

Lets lie to advisors - do they think we are stupid?? extra commission - Nice xmas present!! Why? it will be the last pay packet we'll see......

meanwhile get more AUM for TL under false pretences of 'looking after out clients' for the next month.

happy days - new year in the states Mr Kirley nice fat bonus? a cute % of the extra commissions made between now and then during business as usual - but will your concience be clear??

as a client, my current edj adviser is being very flippent saying carry on investing, business as usual, the BOA is promising me nothing will change, I do not like TL approach I have been there before,

a superior service, I dont think so, I moved away from them as they were concentrating on their bottom line all the time, not on me THE CUSTOMER, I am off to search for my old adviser who left Edward Jones onto pastures new a while ago, this is a disgrace

I am very sorry to hear of your bad experience with TL, obviously you speak from experience. Yes your EJ adviser will be saying carry on investing as they need the commission for the end of the year and yes your BOA will say nothing is changing as we are being told to say this (of which some of us cannot lie). A good number of our offices will be closed down fairly quickly with a large number of redundancies - this is the business world we live in and please believe me when I say that some of us care deeply about our clients and the service we provide. I do suspect a large number of our clients will follow their EJ adviser wherever they may go, you will not be alone.

Kindest regards - BOA

1. TL buys EJ for £1

2. EJ was backed by large resources they lost significant amounts and couldn’t male a go of it.

3. EJ advisers were ‘self employed’ and allegedly owned part of the business.

4. It seems that EJ advisers are far from unanimous in the desire to be taken over by TL. (They probably recall what happened to Baker Tilly).

So what exactly did TL buy? What do they hope to achieve? Bear in mind that the TL accounts for y/e Dec-08 look lousy buy any measure. An operating loss of £7million. Pre Tax loss £10.7 million. Net cash MINUS £5.8 million Pre tax profit margin MINUS 21.8% and so on.

What does this say about TL and would Callum McCarthy be right in this instance when he said the model was broken? Now TL is not skint (yet) they have a reasonable credit rating, but his leads on to wonder how much more patience their sugar daddy will have? An intricate company structure doesn’t even begin to cover it. There seems to be around 22 companies in this spider’s web – not yet counting EJ. How long before their backer gets cold feet? Then what? Will we be left holding the baby via the FSCS?

All too often we have seen empire building end in tears. Mr. Fishers CV indicates that over the last 24 years he has had 11 different jobs – one job every 2.2 years. He’s now been at TL about 3 yrs, so it seems that either he has squllions in share options or are we heading for another move? Either way if I were a stakeholder in TL I wouldn’t be too relaxed.

Harry, take a look at the TL published report and accounts from 2007 - Mr Fisher does indeed have squillions of share options.

Now that the dust has settled and the Edward Jones advisers have received their TL contracts does anyone know what the clients holding individual investments like equities and corporate bonds will do? Can they leave the investments with TL for free but receive no ongoing advice? Will they be offered to sell the investments and move into TL portfolios for free? Hope someone out there can shed some light on this.

Thank god I did not join the financial adviser training programme a year or so ago!

I do know (having worked with them in my job with an asset management firm that runs some of the products they offered) that the UK business, despite its losses, represents less than 1% of EJ globally. Their US and Canadian businesses are huge and very successful. I just don't think the approach works in the UK.

It is worrying that I knew nothing until reading the above article about all the troubles that Edward Jones had! There was - and presumably - isn't now, any transparency or honesty. Clients should have a right to know if a business experiences problems.

I was told by someone who read an article in City Wire that Towry Law did not want to keep clients with portfolios of less than £100,000 - which includes me.

When will I be told this? It is very worrying that I can't simply trust people who I need to trust! Has anyone any answers?