Approaching 30 years ago, I was a divisional manager for a Telford property. Each division was a seperate trust. Mine was the Marine division, running boats, in the Whitsundays.

Telford was a property trust company, guaranteeing 16% return to its investors. The managers knew nothing of the financing, except that we had to return 17% on capital to HO each year. I don't know if it was established as a scam, or became one, due to the pressure to maintain returns to investers, but a scam it ended up, paying returns from new investors money.

At a meeting of of managers 3 of us discovered that we were the only ones, of the 25 there, that could do that, & still remain profitable. Many managers complained, privately, that the properties they ran were not capable of making the returns required.

I became a little worried when there were no ideas to improve profitability, no pep talks, & no pressure on managers to improve their results. However, as a naive engineer, I assumed the regulators would be on top of all these trusts, & what they got up to, & stopped worrying.

18 months later, during the trials, that sent soms directors to prison, I realised that everything the damn regulators should have known, & acted upon, was there in open view, if they had only looked. They had not bothered, so thousands of investors, many of them retirees had lost most of their money. Funny, no regulator lost their job.

Since then, I would never invest, [if there was any money to do so, without selling the farm], in any trust, even if it were run by St Peter himself