But all this is not the reason why I’m writing this post. What I want to say is that at Ban Hin Lee Bank, we worked up one of the best business-to-customer relationships ever seen in the banking industry. All the customers of the bank were truly appreciative of the staff’s efforts to serve them. Visibly, there were the counter staff. Invisibly, the backroom staff were trying their best to meet customers’ expectations for the bank as a whole.

Sadly though, this simple but essential business strategy is lost on modern-day companies. We don’t have many companies who value the goodwill that they can build up with their customers. But maybe they do, but the top management’s efforts are being stymied by their employees who work for them.

As an example, I’d want to say that I haven’t had a 100 percent satisfaction dealing with Mastery Academy in Kuala Lumpur. Mastery Academy is owned by Joey Yap who is perhaps the most renowned fengshui consultant in this part of the world. I have outstanding with them two more Bazi consultations that I want to conclude as soon as possible. I’m sure that they would also want to close their books as quickly too. However, getting in touch with the right persons have been problematic. Telephone calls not getting replied, messages left on their website not getting the attention. So in desperation – one last act if I may call it – I emailed the top guy himself. To his credit, he does read his emails often enough and I had the company call me back within 50 minutes of giving my feedback! Here’s the email I sent him:

Dear Joey,

Although out of politeness I will wish you a Happy Chinese New Year at this time of the year, this is not exactly a standard CNY email to you. This is actually a feedback which I want you to read.

When the Fengshui For Life programme was held in Penang last year, I had signed up for four Bazi consultations for my family. Two have already been completed while the remaining two are still outstanding. I am not very mobile outside my base of Penang and have always been waiting for the opportunities when the team from Mastery Academy come up to the island. I do realise that it will be far easier to visit your office and get them done in Kuala Lumpur but my travels to KL are very, very infrequent.

Now, knowing that you are coming to Penang this Feb 12 with your team, I had contacted the Bazi people at Mastery Academy as long ago as mid-December to arrange for the other two consultations. I was told by Kevin that they would look into it and get back to me. BTW, I had also spoken with Jenna on this matter several times earlier.

My beef is this: until today I haven’t received any reply from Mastery Academy, verbally or by text. How tight a ship is being run by this company? Just this Monday, I tried sending a note through the webpage, hoping for someone to pick up the message and relay it to the relevant person. All I got back was an automated message which you can read below. Getting in touch with me very shortly? I had hoped so. But as it turned out, I was mistaken.

Then this morning I telephoned Mastery Academy and asked to speak to Jenna. Was told that she was on the line. So I left a message requesting for her to call me back. She must still be very busy on the telephone because sadly, four hours after calling the office, my mobile hasn’t rang.

I am a retiree. I retired from a service industry more than two years ago. We didn’t need to be told by our top management that, one, all customer inquiries must be attended to as quickly as possible and, two, the customer is always right. We didn’t need to be told; we knew it by instinct. Accordingly, we built up one of the best business relationships with our customers. Unfortunately companies today have lost sight of this business strategy.

I am sorry if this is not the flattering email that you would wish to read from your fans but it is important that you should know exactly what is happening to sabotage all the good work you have done. Again, Happy Chinese New Year…

Regards

SS Quah

Penang, Malaysia

Maria Assunta was the wife of an Italian property tycoon and she had inherited her fortune from her husband after he died. Her wealth included stock investments and a large portfolio of land and properties in Rome, Milan and Calabria. But for all her millions – which her lawyers finally valued at USD13 million – she was lonely in her old age. Being childless, she lived alone, looked after by only her nurse, Stefania.

Less than four years ago, Assunta picked up a black stray cat from the streets of Rome and started caring for it. Here, at last, was an opportunity for her to fill up her loneliness. Assunta really doted on the cat.

But she knew that she was already old and frail. When her health began to fail two years ago, Assunta began to seek out a way for her beloved Tommaso (that’s the cat’s name) to be properly cared for after her death.

According to one of her lawyers, Anna Orecchioni, Assunta who died two weeks ago had become very fond towards the nurse who assisted her. “We are convinced that Stefania is the right person to carry out the old lady’s wishes. Stefania loves animals just like the woman she devoted herself to right up until the end.”

The lawyers said that Assunta left the fortune to Tommaso in a will she wrote and deposited with them in their Rome office in October 2009. They explained that under Italian law the cat was not entitled to inherit the money directly and as such, the will asked for the money to be given to a “worthy animal association, if one could be found”.

She added: “We had requests from several organizations but we didn’t find any that we thought suitable.” As they were unable to find a satisfactory association to look after Tommaso, Assunta then decided to leave all her money to the cat through her nurse, Stefania, who had cared for the old lady until her dying day.

Stefania told the newspapers that she had no idea of the woman’s incredible wealth. “The old lady suffered from loneliness,” the nurse said. “She looked after that cat more than you’d look after a son. I promised her that I would look after the cat when she was no longer around. She wanted to be sure that Tommaso would be loved and cuddled. But I never imagined that she had this sort of wealth. She was very discreet and quiet. I knew very little of her private life. She only told me that she had suffered a lot from loneliness.”

The nurse now lives with Tommaso and another cat in an undisclosed address to avoid con artists and potential kidnappers.

Tommaso is placed third on a list of wealthy pets behind Kalu the chimp, whose owner left him USD80 million dollars, and Gunther IV, a German shepherd dog who inherited $372 million dollars from his father,  Gunther III,  the beloved companion of an eccentric German countess. Real estate magnate Leona Helmsley famously left USD12 million to her little dog Trouble, although her human descendents contested, and Trouble’s pot was cut to USD2 million.

“It’s absolutely amazing,” a relieved Mrs Nilson said.

The Te Kauwhata couple had been trying to prove their identity and that of their dead son so they could access the money the 17-year-old had saved through the National Bank KiwiSaver Scheme.

To have the money, about $1500, released the couple were required to send a statutory declaration because their son did not have will.

However the Nilsons spent months trying to prove their identity, sending birth and death certificates for Shaun, their driver’s licences, passports, a verified marriage certificate and finally the declaration.

All the while they had been struggling to come to terms with their only son’s death.

Shaun was killed when he was a passenger in a car that crashed into a powerpole and tree in Hamilton’s Heaphy Tce on May 28.

The driver, Levi Elliott, who was then 16, was sentenced to three years’ jail for manslaughter in the High Court at Hamilton on Thursday.

“For me it’s only $1000 or $1500, it’s no real biggie,” Mrs Nilsonsaid.

“But if I was a widow and it was major and I was an older lady, I’d have given up.”

She said the fund was almost put in the “too hard basket” because of everything else they were trying to deal with after Shaun’s death.

As well as carrying on for their surviving child, 5-year-old daughter Laura, the Nilsons were struggling to sort out finances when Mrs Nilson, a self-employed swim coach, stopped working after the crash.

A spokesman for KiwiSaver provider OnePath said it was pleased to have resolved the situation for the family.

“It must have been very frustrating for them in terms of the delay considering their circumstances.”

He said that by law the trustee needed the statutory declaration to finalise the estate requirements which included the age of the dead person, the value of the investment, whether they left a will and who was administering that estate.

“In this instance there was a confusion in the documentation between who the funds were going to be released to since we were dealing with a solicitor at the time.”

The spokesman said that without a will the provider was responsible for ensuring it was releasing the funds to the right person and on this occasion it took longer than usual.

“But the most important thing is we were able to process this as soon as we received the correct and completed statutory declaration and that finalised our deceased estate requirements.”

A Financial Markets Authority spokesman said people having trouble getting KiwiSaver funds released early could complain about the process or length of time it took to Financial Services Complaints Ltd, a disputes resolution service, or to the authority itself.

I’ve a similar story to tell about the workplace. Many employers are unaware of the lengths that some of their staff go through just to earn a living. There was one chap who worked as a driver to a managing director in a big company in Shah Alam. However, he lived a long distance away and had to commute by public transport. Well, you know the inconveniences of public transport. What is supposed to be an eight-hour working day can stretch to 10 hours or more by the time he returned home.

So one day, this managing director decided to visit Kampung Kuantan after dark to watch their famous fireflies. All of a sudden, he came across his driver who was passing by on his motorcycle.

Only then did the executive realise the distance that his driver had to travel daily from his home to Shah Alam and back, in all sorts of weather conditions, just to drive him to work. He could not change his driver’s circumstances but from that day on, he learnt to appreciate the driver’s services more.

The moral of this story is that it is important that we should be sensitive to the people around us and see things with our heart and not only with our eyes.

These days, there are many interest groups and non-governmental organisations that seems to pop out of nowhere to comment on current issues. Often, their views are skewed and highly predictable. Public debate becomes a cacophony of noise and nothing meaningful emerges to help solve the problems.

We will never see the full picture if we have a blinkered view of life and look at things from our own perspective. We need to step back in order to move forward. That is why I feel it is important to look beyond ourselves and imagine what it is like to be in another person’s shoes. Only them can we progress with our lives and nation.

Yes, my email provider has done a pretty good job to sieve out these messages from the bona fide ones.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t give a second thought before deleting them forever from my email account but I had just noticed an interesting story from a New Zealand newspaper about how a lawyer was duped in an Internet scam. So I went looking deeper into my Spam messages.

Without going into details, I would hazard that more than 70 percent of these spam messages were scams of one type or another. Among the most popular was still the inheritance scam. A long time ago, it used to be letters received through the postal services – it still puzzles me how those African scammers managed to get hold of my postal address some 30 years ago but I did receive one or two – but now, every scam is delivered through emails.

Worse, it is no longer the Africans at the centre of the scams. A good proportion are starting to come from China. The Chinese scammers, it seems, are just as notorious as the Nigerians at this game.

The one rule of thumb that I always practise is to ignore all such emails. Nothing is free in this world and don’t expect to be the sudden beneficiary of a windfall from an unexpected corner of the world. It’s all a, repeat after me, a SCAM.

Anyhow, here is the story from the newspaper in New Zealand.

A retired Rotorua lawyer and his client were shown pallets of cash in Amsterdam as proof of a $27 million inheritance but the pair were instead duped in an internet scam, a court has been told.

John David Rangitauira, 59, is on trial in Rotorua District Court after pleading not guilty to four charges of obtaining by deception and an alternative charge of theft by a person in a special relationship.

He stood to make $6 million from the $27 million inheritance offered to Jennifer Taukamo in an email from “Central Bank” and flew to Amsterdam where the pair were shown “heaps” of money, which came out on pallets, the court heard.

However, when Ms Taukamo fell ill she gave the lawyer authority to act on her behalf. When the overseas contacts began demanding money to clear the inheritance, Rangitauira borrowed from Westpac Bank but also allegedly used $338,000 from a Maori trust that he chaired. The $27 million promised to the pair never arrived.

“It will become apparent that they [Rangitauira and Ms Taukamo] were duped. They were scammed. This was all just a have,” Crown Solicitor Fletcher Pilditch told the court.

Mr Pilditch said Ms Taukamo received the inheritance email and approached Rangitauira as she needed a lawyer to help her. She had never met Rangitauira, who at that time owned Rotorua law firm Rangitauira & Co. Rangitauira stood to make $6 million from the inheritance.

Rangitauira was also chairman and lawyer for Te Houoterangi Trust, which owned 25ha planted in pine.

Ms Taukamo told the court she and Rangitauira flew to Amsterdam where she was shown “heaps” of money on pallets. She said she was told the money needed cleaning and she was given a $100 note and was shown a chemical to clean the cash.

The pair returned without any of the money. Two weeks later, Ms Taukamo had a heart attack and stroke. She said she gave Rangitauira the authority to get the inheritance. Demands for money were made by the overseas contacts in order to clear it.

Rangitauira borrowed from Westpac, saying he needed the money to buy property overseas. He was loaned various amounts which he then banked into accounts overseas. He borrowed a total of $506,000.

In 2006, the Maori trust made $414,000 from harvesting trees and $100,000 was given to the trust’s 513 beneficiaries as dividends.

In July 2007, Rangitauira wrote to his fellow trustees telling them there was $340,000 left over and it was in a bank earning 4.5 per cent interest but he could invest it to earn 7.5 per cent interest.

He created a document for the trustees to sign for money to be invested to earn the higher interest but used $338,834.48 to meet the demands for the inheritance. He transferred the cash in nine lots between October 2007 and February 2008, the court heard.

The alleged offending came to light when Rangitauira’s accountants needed information about money going overseas. Towards the end of 2009, Rangitauira told the trust the money had been lost and he would stand down.

The first the trust knew about what the money had been used for was when trustees were approached by the Serious Fraud Office. The offending is alleged to have happened between April 2005 and February 2008 at Rotorua and elsewhere.

Defence lawyer Jeremy Bioletti said Rangitauira had been systematically defrauded over a long period.

“That situation is a modern problem because of the use of the internet. What you are going to have to assess is the state of mind of a person who themselves is being defrauded or deceived or by deception induced to send money overseas to people who are plainly criminals.”

No one was foolproof, “whether they are a truck driver or solicitor or the winner of MasterChef, it makes no difference”

At the centre of this legal dispute in Muar, Johor, was whether a signed marriage certificate was valid or not. The High Court there said that the document was invalid because of a questionable signature. And because of that, there were repercussions.

But the real moral of this story is that you don’t have to be a millionaire before you get your Will written.

What happened was that this woman, Kuan Siew Yen, had filed a claim to the estate of Tan Chin Shing at the High Court. Tan was 43 years old when he died in 2005 without having written a Will, and Kuan had wanted to prevent his elder brother from administering the estate of the deceased.

She claimed to have been married to the deceased and had submitted a marriage certificate purportedly issued through an assistant registrar at the Muar Chinese Chambers of Commerce.

However, the judge hearing the civil suit rejected Kuan’s application as the marriage was false. According to the judge, the marriage could not be legal as the signature of the assistant registrar differed on the marriage certificate and Kuan was unable to produce her two witnesses to her marriage.

The judge also allowed Tan’s elder brother’s counter suit to declare Kuan as not being the deceased’s legal wife and thus, could not stake a claim to the estate.

The news report as it appeared in The Star newspaper appears below.

“Most young people do not bother to think about retirement until too late in life. Being human, we always have to contend with the issue of dying too early or living too long. We may not have sufficient time to accumulate enough funds for our loved ones if we were to die too early,” he said in his address at the seventh Asian Conference on Pension and Retirement Planning in Kuala Lumpur.

Life expectancy, he said, has improved and many Malaysians could now expect to enjoy extended life spans of 15 to 20 years after retirement at age 60.

According to him, the crucial issue was the decline in the fertility and birth rates. “Young kids now having fewer children and at the same time the parents live longer, so it is a bigger burden for the children. That is why they need to save early on their own. They will live longer than us and they will have even fewer children to depend on as the trends are showing now,” he said.

Kwo also said that most people only saved for retirement through Employees Provident Fund. Pension savings were normally given out as a lump sum, which probably would be exhausted in less than five years, and the payments were not adjusted for inflation and cost of living.

June 11th, 2009 – The Association of Banks in Malaysia (ABM) would like to affirm that in line with the objectives of protecting the interest of the consumers and fostering greater confidence in the banking sector, guidelines have long been in place to provide that the card holder’s maximum liability for unauthorized transactions as a consequence of a lost or stolen credit card shall be confined to a limit specified by the bank issuing the credit card, which shall not exceed RM250. This limit applies only in the event the cardholder has not acted fraudulently or has not failed to inform the bank as soon as reasonably practicable after having found out his or her credit card was lost or stolen.

To the best of ABM’s knowledge, these guidelines have been adhered to and banks have acted reasonably and fairly (and will continue to do so) in all circumstances where it was established that the cardholder was an unfortunate victim and there was no contributory negligence on his or her part. In many instances, however, investigations have revealed that the cardholder had failed to take proper care or that the cardholder did not take prompt action after the loss or theft of the credit card was discovered. ABM will be happy to assist with any queries if any.

Chuah Mei Lin
Executive Director
The Association of Banks in Malaysia

This newspaper article that appeared on 10 Jun 2009 proclaimed victory for the cardholder as the High Court in Kuala Lumpur limited the cardholder’s liability to only RM250. Although the RM250 limit will still have to be borne by the cardholder, at least he should be relieved that he doesn’t have to carry the burden of paying the full amount of the fraudulent loss. Here is the news report:

Malaysia “had the force of law”. He also held that the guidelines limited the liability of the cardholder to only RM250 where loss is reported promptly.

Apandi held that “the bank’s attempt to modify these guidelines and to remove this protection was contrary to law and public policy”.

The decision of the High Court also declared the bank to be in contravention of the Payments Systems Act that could subject the organisation  to a maximum penalty of RM500,000 and a further fine of RM1,000 per day as long as the offence continues.

Datuk Vijay Kumar Natarajan appeared for Chee while the bank was represented by Robin Lim.

Chee, 25, said she was relieved and grateful that her ordeal was over as the charges would have amounted to almost her entire month’s salary.

She was also thankful that a senior counsel had agreed to take up her case and refer the matter to the High Court for a ruling.

“I lodged a complaint with Bank Negara but no action was taken by the Central Bank to enforce the guidelines it had issued,” Chee told Malay Mail. “I also didn’t receive any conclusive reply to my complaint.”

Chee said she was adamant not to give in and had no alternative but to seek redress from the court. However, legal cost was a worry for her. “I am thankful that my counsel agreed to take up the case. I sincerely hope that Bank Negara will now ensure that card issuers follow the guidelines and take all necessary action to protect consumers like me.

“There are many cases one can read about over the Internet – and many have been made to pay thousands when they should not have paid more than RM250.”

Consumer activists such as the Consumer Association of Penang long abeen pushing for the enforcement of the guidelines since they were issued in March 2003.

There had been numerous reports of cardholders being penalised and facing hardship in having to pay for goods that had been bought on their stolen cards. Many were forced into paying, sometimes discounted amounts which were much more than RM250.

With yesterday’s ruling, the general public can breathe a sigh of relief as there have been hundreds of such cases brought up in the past. Efforts to obtain a more sympathetic approach from the banks, especially in cases where the cards were stolen, had not achieved much success.