The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has fined Topps Rogers Financial Management £97,600 for mis-selling unregulated collective investment schemes (UCIS).

UCIS are only considered suitable for high net worth or sophisticated investors and the FSA stated that Topps Rogers ‘failed to take reasonable care to ensure that its recommendations relating to UCIS were suitable for its customers’.

The FSA report claimed Topps Rogers promoted to, and advised, 94 customers to invest over £12 million in UCIS, either directly or through a self-invested personal pension (SIPP).

The regulator has stripped Sheffield-based Topps Rogers of its permissions, meaning that it will no longer be authorised and regulated.

Martin Rigney, ‘the only adviser and partner who performs significant influence functions at Topps Rogers’, has also had his approval withdrawn as the FSA considered him ‘not to be a fit and proper person to perform controlled functions and an unfit controller’.

The mis-selling of UCIS was recently the subject of a warning note from the FSA, which has noticed an increase in firms promoting these risky and unregulated investments to investors unable to understand the risks.

In January this year, the FSA withdrew the permissions of Bath-based Pave Financial Management for the mis-selling of UCIS, and fined its founder and director Tim Pattison £90,000 for ‘reckless conduct’ in promoting UCIS to his clients.