The government is expected to announce compensation plans for the members of collapsed insurance company Equitable Life this week. A statement providing details of the much awaited decision is to be presented to the House of Commons, widely anticipated for the back end of this week.
Some media reports have suggested that the plans will include the setting up of an independent tribunal to calculate the level of compensation that should be provided to victims of the collapse; people who have lost out greatly with annuity payments.
The Daily Telegraph did also report that the tribunal was expected to rule that the government and regulators were only actually partly responsible.
The government had been expected to present its response to a Parliamentary Ombudsman report on Equitable Life in the autumn of last year but this was pushed back until January, 2009.
The massive 2,800-page report, that took around four years to compile, published in July 2008, called for regulators to apologise to victims and set up a commission to calculate how much compensation should be paid.
You might recall that this fiasco was all about the way in which Equitable Life made promises to annuity holders that they could not afford. They built into their pension annuities guaranteed annuity rates that they were simply not able to meet financially.
