Ian Golding & Ors, R (on the application of) v Financial Services Compensation Scheme Limited

Facts

Three lead claimants, Ian Golding, Karen Cumming and Peter Davies, were selected by agreement to test the issues, and 48 further claims were stayed behind them. The claimants say that poor advice from an unregulated adviser, Avacade Ltd, led them to transfer their existing pensions into a SIPP run by a regulated entity, Liberty SIPP. The transfers took place between December 2011 and August 2012. All or a material proportion of each fund was then invested in a high-risk pooled scheme: Ethical Forestry Ltd (melina trees in Costa Rica) for Mr Golding and Ms Cumming, and Global Plantations (teak trees in Malaysia) for Mr Davies. The investments failed. Liberty SIPP rejected the claimants' complaints and went into administration on 27 April 2020. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme found that Liberty SIPP had negligently failed to carry out adequate due diligence and compensated the claimants for their lost funds, but not for the returns their original pensions would have earned. After the Court of Appeal decided Adams v Options UK Personal Pensions LLP and Financial Conduct Authority v Avacade Ltd, the FSCS looked at the claims again under section 27 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA). In June 2025 it rejected them as time-barred, holding that the six-year period in section 9 of the Limitation Act 1980 ran from the transfer. The scheme rules require the FSCS to reject a claim that limitation would have defeated (COMP 8.2.3R). Kimblin J granted permission for judicial review on one ground: that the FSCS had wrongly read section 27(2)(a) and (b) of FSMA as creating a single cause of action that always accrues on the transfer date.