In another loss to AMP, the court has ordered the embattled wealth giant to pay interest on the Buyer of Last Resort case.
In orders announced by the Federal Court on Tuesday afternoon, Equity Financial Planners, which had been awarded damages of $814,944.76 was additionally awarded interest valued at $151,138.42.
WealthStone, which had been awarded $115,533.51 in damages, was now due $17,177.84 of interest. AMP has a deadline of 28 days to pay the claimants.
The court had announced the outcomes of the BOLR class action in July, after proceedings commenced last October.
During the tenure of CEO Francesco De Ferrari, AMP announced in 2019 it would reduce the buy-out multiples of the BOLR agreement from 4.0x to 2.5x recurring revenue, due to fears of a “BOLR run” in the wake of the Hayne royal commission.
The eponymous commissioner, Kenneth Hayne, had questioned the BOLR arrangements, arguing the arrangements treated books of clients as a tradeable asset valued on revenue.
Additionally, there would be further reductions on the BOLR value of grandfathered commissions, which would reduce from four times to 1.42 times, with a further “glide path” reduction of 0.833 times per month until it reached zero by the start of 2021.
AMP had provisioned $50 million in its 1H23 results for BOLR remediation, which a class action member described to Professional Planner as “absurdly small”.
However, current AMP chief executive Alexis George said it’s the “best estimate” the company had to go on, based information then available to them.
Evidence in the court proceedings suggested the former AMP leadership expected 700 practices could seek to exit the industry following in the following three years with an aggregate transaction value of $900 million.
It also noted that since the final royal commission report was published, 45 practices (combined value of $70 million) had submitted an exit notice.