From Peter Wall.
I have stepped down as chairman of the Jersey Landsbanki Action Group and have also stepped down from the committee of the Landsbanki Guernsey Depositors Action Group. There are a number of reasons and these have been published on the website for members to read.
Further to a meeting I attended in Guernsey a number of weeks ago, I decided that from my own point of view I could no longer take the campaign any further. I feel the whole thing should now be left with the professionals on the LGDAG committee.
We are now very unlikely to recover 100% of our savings and the administrators are trying to salvage what they can. What I write here needs to be published and out in the open, if only to help our cause and make the powers that be sit up and listen. This may also encourage more savers to come forward and step out of their comfort zone.
I started the action group three days after the bank went down. One week later, after a radio interview, I called a meeting at the Town Hall that resulted in a turn-out of more than 60 savers. I have since been in numerous interviews and have also been involved in a number of meetings with Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf. To date I have spent three to five hours a day, sometimes working until the early hours, to try to find a solution to this problem.
In the early days I spoke to many distressed people, ranging from a guy wondering if he should go on his usual cliff walk as he felt he may have jumped, to one man willing to set himself alight to fight the cause. Oh yes, and there was the individual who e-mailed me from his hotel room in Dubai thanking me and suggesting he would see me in heaven some day. I was able to deal with these and many more calls, this while I was still grieving for the recent loss of my own mother.
My main disappointment to come out of all this was that, as chairman and founder member of the group, I was never offered the opportunity to attend the two meetings with Guernsey Chief Minister Trott. Whether this could have changed events I am unsure, but I would have liked to air my personal views to the minister. Many who have met me will know I definitely would not have came out of those meetings until we had some concrete answers.
Over the past month or so I have become frustrated with the many people who on various websites have taken great delight in knocking ordinary working people who have worked very hard, many an entire lifetime, and now find themselves facing the prospect of maybe losing up to 70% of their life savings.
This may have been an Icelandic bank, but if the truth be known many of the high street banks were only days away from a complete collapse and we would have all been in trouble. In general, I do feel that website forums are very good tools where people can hide behind a computer screen in the privacy of their own homes and make whatever comments they wish, while staying anonymous.
As a member of the LGDAG website, I will take a keen interest in the events and where I can I will make a positive comment. If any saver in Jersey would like to contact me I would be more that happy to meet them. I thank all those who have supported me and I am just sorry that I have not been able draw a satisfactory conclusion to the unfortunate issue of Landsbanki Guernsey.
I am staying positive and urge everyone to keep up their spirits in these trying times, and for those who have joined the Action Group please give your full support to the many individuals who are working without remuneration on your behalf. I wish the LGDAG committee the best of luck with their campaign.
102 Quennevais Park,
St Brelade.
