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As an update to my post about the companies listed on the Stockmarket, who deal in secured loans, and also for my personal use I thought I’d put together a list of the dates when results are expected from the various PLCs.

Before I do that, I was just pondering what has happened to the stock market listing of The One Advice Group, who trade under the names Ask Finance, All Clear and One Advice. The group was supposed to be listed in Mid-Summer but amongst critisism of the IVA market from various organisations, primarily the Banks, it said it had delayed the listing until September or October and yet there has been no further news about it. One advice is currently primarily owned by Flexion and the individuals Miles Grady, Nicholas Holmes, Christopher Holmes and Terence Sweeney and was reportedly listing to raise further funds - strange that it has now gone quiet.

Anyhow, less of my pondering, and on with the Diary Dates

Barclays PLC (BARC) 3rd Quarter Update 28th November (Estimate)
Debts.co.uk (DETS) First Full Year 24th October (Concrete)
Compass Finance Group (CAF) Full Year 7th December (Concrete)
Debtmatters Group (DEBT) End of November Interims (Estimate)
Elephant Loans and Mortgages (ELEP) Interims Mid December (Estimate)
Cattles PLC (CTT) Mid March Finals (Estimate)

One little story that caught my eye today was over the confusion organisations sometimes have over whether they should be charging VAT for their Financial services or not.

The story mentioned above, talks about Financial Packagers being exempt from charging VAT, but when they bunch together to form an Alliance then the monies they receive from lenders, for commission/marketing etc., ARE vatable.

The story illustrates just how common place such confusion is. It also talks about one organisation being told by their accountant that they did not need to charge VAT, only to later learn from the Customs and Excise that they did need to charge VAT. My advice for anyone pondering such an issue is to ask the Customs and Excise directly and to cut out the accountant - it is always better to hear things straight from the horse’s mouth.

The story talks about one organisation facing a bill of £750,000 for 6 years of unpaid VAT - so you might well end up wearing a barrel as well as being put over one!

For the record, item 9 from Notice 701/49 of the HMRC VAT manual tells you which supplies of intermediary services are exempt from VAT. And item 10 details what is meant by the term “financial service”.

Perhaps because of dressing it up in non common words or perhaps because of a general disregard for such matters, I find it interesting that the FSAs report yesterday that it had sent out a letter to Chief Executives of regulated firms about ‘Stress Management’ hasn’t been more widely reported. In fact, and forgive me if I have missed one, but I can’t find any mention of it anywhere in any of the National Newspapers.

In this context ‘Stress’ is taken to mean the stress that a business can be subject to before it breaks down and is not the stress of a 16 hour a day, whisky drinking, chain smoking white collar worker with high blood pressure, as one might think. The idea behind the FSAs work in this area is presumably to guard against disasters - whether it be financial implosion, natural disaster or terrorism action that threatens to bring capitalism to its knees. I guess someone has to worry about it and, rather than everyone pressing the panic button, it is perhaps an opportune moment to quote JFK who said ‘it is better to repair your roof when the sun is shining’.

As part of its work on Stress Management the FSA visited 10 large organisations to see what levels of contingency planning, risk management and risk measurement the firms had in place. Presumably the FSA concentrated on large organisations with the belief that financial meltdown and therefore capitalism breakdown would only happen if firms like those were directly impacted. Perhaps they forget that in a house of cards the ones at the top are held up by the ones below. I just wonder how seriously businesses take risk management and how much resource is thrown at it. Oh well, if you get bored you might want to read the FSA’s PDF about it for yourself.