Dear Hillary,
I recently came to Thailand to visit my father whom I hadn’t seen in five years. My
mother and he got a divorce about 6 years ago and I hadn’t been in contact with him
since then because my mother didn’t want me to. I always respected her feelings,
since the divorce was a nasty one, but I always thought about my father and didn’t
stop loving him. Last year my mother died and I started to search for my father. After I
found out that he had moved to Pattaya, I got in contact with him. My father seemed to be
very happy about it and he invited me to come visit him.
After I arrived I got a big shock: He has a Thai wife (he
met her four years ago) and a little son of three years. Even though I was in contact with
him for several months and we were writing letters back and forth, he never told me about
it. I am already 29 years old, my father is over 60 and now he has a little son and I have
a brother! It really hurts me and I feel - again - deserted. My father told me he
didn’t want to tell me at the beginning and his new family was meant to be a surprise
for me. He was right; it was a big surprise, but a very unpleasant one for me. Now I have
the feeling my father doesn’t love me anymore and I believe that he never really
loved me, otherwise he would have contacted me. When I told him so, he said he was trying
to contact me, but apparently my mother didn’t pass on the letters he wrote to me.
Should I believe him? There is nobody left to prove it.
What should I do about this situation? I am thinking of cutting short my
vacation and going home earlier than planned. Please Hillary, tell me if I am
over-reacting.
Deserted Daughter
Dear Deserted Daughter,
I believe you have not really been deserted. Yes, you father and your mother had a
divorce. Yes, your father went away to start another life. Who can blame him? Did you
expect him to live all alone and miserable for the rest of his life? I am sure your mother
started a different life also. If not with a new husband, than with new friends. I tend to
believe your father that he wanted to get in contact with you. It might be very possible
that your mother not only didn’t wish that you stayed in contact with your father,
but did everything to avoid you getting in touch with him. I believe I understood right
that you were already 23 years old when your parents got a divorce. If you loved your
father so much, why didn’t you try to find out where and how he was during all those
years? Having respect for your mother’s feelings is all right, but you could have
done it without her knowledge.
You have to accept the fact that your father is re-married and you should
be happy to have a baby-brother. Try to love him the way you still love your father; and
be nice to his new wife. Remember, it was not her fault that your father left your mother.
She met him long after the divorce. You lost your mother last year and as far as I
understood you have been the only child. Be open-minded and be happy to have a completely
new family.
Presented by Bangkok-Pattaya Hospital
by Dr. Iain Corness
Your gallbladder lives under your liver, on the right hand
side of your tummy, just under the ribs. A great little organ which helps with digestion.
Unfortunately, it has a tendency to produce gallstones and these can produce an internal
gallbladder blockage.
These little stones (and sometimes not so little) are very common in the
community. 10% of men and 15% of women will develop these in their lifetime, so you stand
a reasonable chance of getting one.
The "classic" gallstone sufferer is described as 5F - Fat, Fair,
Forty, Female & Fertile! Do I see some of our ex-pat ladies clutching at their tummies
already!
However, it’s not as disastrous as it sounds - 75% of gallstones do
not produce any symptoms at all, so breathe easy girls!
Mind you, if you do get symptoms, you’ll know about it. The classic
symptom is a colicky acute pain in the gallbladder area which we call "Biliary
colic" and you call "Aaagh! Get the doctor!"
Fortunately, these attacks of biliary colic usually settle fairly quickly
and by the time the doctor has got there the patient is sitting up and smiling.
How do you know if you are carrying around a little time bomb of
gallstones? Your doctor will suspect their presence from the history of pain attacks and
will order an Ultrasound of your gallbladder region. These are fancy "X-rays"
without the radiation, the image being produced by "ultra" sound waves and the
image received by a sensor and projected via TV screen.
Some stones go past the neck of the gallbladder into the bile duct and
these are a little harder to trace. These we winkle out using a technique called ERCP
(endoscopic retrograde cholangio-pancreatography, if you insist on knowing!) and requires
a small procedure to get and endoscope tube into the bile duct.
For troublesome stones the best answer is surgery. There are some centres
which try to dissolve the little blighters with tablets, or blast them apart with a fancy
technique called ESWL (extra-corporeal shock wave lithotripsy), but surgery is still
number one in the treatment list.
The newer "laparascopic" surgical techniques are quite fantastic
(first performed in France in 1987) and leave you with only three little puncture wounds
instead of the usual 4" - 6" scar. Unfortunately, not everyone is suitable for
lap surgery.
So that’s the gallstone picture. To try to avoid getting them,
don’t have too much sugar in your diet, don’t get overweight and don’t be a
teetotaler! A "little" alcohol is good for you - the problem is, what
constitutes "a little"? But that’s another story!
By Leslie Wright
Schemes & Scams
A wide variety of genuine investment opportunities are available to
international investors.
These include collective investment schemes run by major
internationally-recognised institutions, such as unit trusts, mutual funds, and
unit-linked insurance policies.
These schemes are designed to accommodate relatively modest amounts of
money, and are ideal for most investors who have neither the time nor expertise to manage
their own investment portfolios.
As the firms which offer these schemes are very substantial, well
established, and mostly located in well-regulated regimes, the risk of losing your money
as a result of the firm’s failure is very small.
These types of investments can therefore be regarded as highly secure, and
generally produce an acceptable if relatively modest return, ranging from 5% - 25% per
annum, depending on the specific investment funds selected.
Market movements of course play a considerable part in determining this
return, so professional ongoing advice on your portfolio is useful to optimise gains and
minimise losses.
Private banking
For very wealthy individuals, personal investment portfolios are
offered by private banking divisions of major international banks.
Again, the majority of international banks are well regulated, and the
risk of loss as a result of the institution’s folding are limited.
In some countries legislation is in place to protect investors’ bank
deposits - but in most cases only relatively modest amounts are fully protected, and
should the chosen bank fail, investors are at risk of losing much of their capital if the
bank in question is not supported by a third party.
This was the case with BICC some years back, and would have been the case
more recently with Barings Bank in the U.K., had it not been bought up by another
international bank. (A similar scenario is happening now in Thailand, with support being
actively sought from major overseas banks by encouraging them to buy substantial stakes in
various ailing local banks, to fend off a collapse in the local over-extended banking
system.)
Direct Investment
For more hands-on investors, direct investments into bond- or
stock-markets can be made through well-known international brokerage houses such as
Merrill Lynch, for example.
Large well-established brokerages are unlikely to go bust, but small ones
could, and if they did and were holding your money at the time, you’d have little
legal recourse against them and could lose a substantial proportion of your capital.
There have been many cases of forex dealers and bullion traders
disappearing overnight, taking all their investors’ money with them. (Hong Kong is
notorious for this.)
Scams feed on greed
A large number of investment schemes promise a considerably
higher return than can be regarded as "normal".
These are often accompanied by such enticing phrases as "100%
guaranteed" or "supported by leading banks" or "will earn you 10 - 75%
per month."
These comforting phrases are all designed to stimulate your greed and
overcome your prudence and common sense. The objective is to induce you to part with your
money, which you may never see again.
Scams are commonplace, and tricksters rely on the fact that many investors
desire high returns and low risks but are unfamiliar with fraudulent practices.
Investments which appear out of the ordinary beg common sense to
intervene, but all too often that is not the case. Fraudsters and confidence-tricksters
rely on the fact that their offers sound very enticing, and appeal to the greed in all of
us to make money quickly.
A scheme which is available "only to a select few" or is "a
ground-floor opportunity" should set off warning bells, but too often doesn’t.
Warning bells
Some of the sophisticated-sounding investments that one
sometimes comes across include Standby Letters of Credit; Bank Secured Capital
Enhancements; Prime Bank Discounted Guarantees; High Yield Guaranteed Investments; Secured
Investment Trading; 40 Weeks Guaranteed Return Investment Programs; Prime Bank Discounted
Letters of Credit; Bank Debenture Trading Programs; Prime Bank Guarantees of 106%;
Leveraged Capital Trading Programs.
If you are considering investing into any of these, first ask yourself
whether you fully understand exactly what this investment is (most people don’t), how
it works, and really how secure it is. If you cannot obtain clear and satisfactory
answers, it’s probably a scam.
If your investment will be held in a "Joint Venture Account" or
"Safekeeping Deposit Account" or "Protected With Buy/Sell Agreements",
you should also be wary.
If you’re asked to provide a Bank Comfort Letter, Bank Letter of
Commitment, Letter of Intent, or Letter of Authority, be careful what this will enable the
holder to do.
For example, if you are asked to provide authority for some third party to
access your bank account - often with the comforting story that this is to remit the gains
on your investment - you might find it suddenly emptied...
(However, a specific bank instruction letter to remit a specified amount
from your bank to the bank account of a major internationally-recognised investment
institution is a totally different matter, as is providing that same institution with
instructions to remit the proceeds of your investment back to your bank account.)
The Nigerian Invoice Trick
A scam which has been around for years but amazingly still
catches some unwary people is the now famous Nigerian invoice trick.
An entrepreneur receives a letter out of the blue from Nigeria, typically
on an official-looking letterhead, claiming that the writer has access to millions of
dollars of the former-government’s money which he needs help to get out of the
country, and would the recipient please provide a blank letterhead and company invoice to
enable this money to be sent overseas, in return for which assistance you will be paid a
commission of over a million dollars - and to make transferring this commission easy,
please provide details of your bank account, thank you very much.
Many people have fallen for this, and had their bank accounts promptly
emptied, with of course no recourse.
Other scams have involved ground-breaking inventions which need
capitalisation to get going (although some of these may in fact be quite genuine); shares
in gold mines which later turned out to have been salted to produce enticing assay reports
(there was one such case in Indonesia not long ago); housing or condominium developments
which are located in places the investors are never likely to visit, and which never get
built... (Much swampland in Florida was sold this way some years ago, but the same
practice continues in other places, and a few pretty pictures of proposed developments
which will produce a "guaranteed return of at least 25% in the first year" still
catch unwary investors!)
People can’t see the wood for the trees
Timberland and forest development is another one. Asking you to
invest in fast-growing trees (which can’t lose because of the world demand for
timber) in out-of-the-way places (which you’re unlikely to be able to visit), may in
some cases be quite genuine investment opportunities for some people who want a
medium-term investment that sounds good at the dinner table.
After all, to mention casually that you’ve just bought a forest in
Ayrshire sounds much more sophisticated than telling your dinner companions that
you’ve just taken out an offshore insurance bond!
However, the con-artists have caught onto the snobbish appeal of this type
of investment, and even enforce this by mentioning "important" co-investors or
partners in the venture who are often public figures (whom you are unlikely to be able to
contact to check the truth of such claims.)
Common sense would tend to indicate that if the potential investment were
that good, and rich or powerful public figures were indeed involved, why do they need your
comparatively paltry investment?
But common sense isn’t too common, unfortunately - far less common
than greed, it seems.
Rich and powerful people rarely fall for these scams; they are financially
secure already, and don’t need to take the risks inherent in acquiring wealth
quickly.
For the rest of us, security of your investments should be of paramount
importance, and the risks of any investment carefully considered in light of the potential
return.
If you are considering investing into a scheme which indicates it will
produce an above-average gain, consider the risk of losing your capital. If it’s an
amount you can afford to lose, then by all means go ahead - with your eyes wide open and
without rose-coloured spectacles.
Otherwise, stick to schemes you can understand, check, access and control.
If you have any comments or queries on this article, or about other
topics concerning investment matters, write to Leslie Wright, c/o Family Money, Pattaya
Mail, or fax him directly on (038) 232522 or e-mail him at [email protected]. Further
details and back articles can be accessed on his firm’s website on
www.westminsterthailand.com.
Leslie Wright is Managing Director of Westminster Portfolio Services
(Thailand) Ltd., a firm of independent financial advisors providing advice to expatriate
residents of the Eastern Seaboard on personal financial planning and international
investments.