
The Man Who Could Own Aviva France (2015) - wskinner
https://web.archive.org/web/20150228011715/https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/27/2120422/meet-the-man-who-could-own-aviva-france/
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wskinner
This is actually from FT Allhaville. I posted the archive.org link because
sometime since 2015 the article has been placed behind a login page.

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tanderson92
see also at Bloomberg, "Arbitrage Discovered":
[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-02-27/arbitrage...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-02-27/arbitrage-
discovered)

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wskinner
This is also a great piece - it’s how I found the article myself.

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tanderson92
I figured as much, since a similar insurance contract story was in Friday's
newsletter and linked to this piece.

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gwern
Apparently still fighting as of December 2017:
[https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-5186489/You...](https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-5186489/You-
owe-ONE-BILLION-euros-investor-tells-Aviva.html)

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captain_perl
> It could not tear up thousands of contracts, so it tried a more subtle
> tactic: policy holders were sent new papers, with the offer of 100 francs
> for the trouble (about £10). It is a measure of the bureaucrat’s art that
> almost all did sign, but the Georges declined.

US banks tried the same trick during the 2008 mortgage crisis. They mailed
letters to certain mortgage holders that would have resulted in non-recourse
(walk-away) loans becoming recourse loans.

The US DOJ also tried something similar. They sent letters to large companies
requesting their boards not fund lawyers for CEOs, so that the DOJ could
increase their conviction rate against white-collar defendants.

Bureaucrats.

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pontifier
I'm fighting a similar, but much smaller battle myself... In early 2014, I
acquired initial coin distribution stakes in a cryptocurrency called NEM for
myself and my son. The developers decided to confiscate any stakes that went
unclaimed during a poorly noticed and arbitrary claim period.

In January 2018 the coins my son and I were supposed to receive were worth
$9M. I'm extremely upset about this, and the people behind it seem to have no
shame about keeping the coins of the hundreds of people in this same
situation.

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xaranke
Maybe this is a dumb question, but it what stops Aviva from publishing new
prices every minute or every second?

> prices for the funds were published each Friday, and clients were allowed to
> switch funds at those prices anytime before the next price was published,
> even if markets moved in the meantime.

Publishing prices every Friday just seems like a formality, from what I can
gather it isn't written in the contract.

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mikeash
I suspect the contract is written such that the prices are to be given to the
customer each Friday, and the customer has until the next scheduled delivery
on the following Friday to reallocate their funds. Aviva could publish more
often but it wouldn't change anything.

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mikeash
What possesses a company to offer such an obviously dumb product? The article
offers some speculation but nothing particularly convincing.

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SamReidHughes
It was the eighties.

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mikeash
Is this a reference to how they probably thought it wouldn't be a problem
because people couldn't get pricing info fast enough at the time?

If so, I don't quite buy that. Maybe that really is what they thought, but it
seems pretty dumb. The info was surely available. The average person might not
be able to get to it, but someone working in the financial industry with
access to specialized feeds could have.

It sounds like this was common in France but not elsewhere. Was something
different about France that made it seem reasonable?

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SamReidHughes
Sorry, I was trying to make a joke.

My understanding last time I read about this was that nobody knows why.

