The alleged shortcomings have prompted a lawyer to raise the issue with MPs.
Arck used financial advisers to market unregulated ‘sale and repurchase’ (SARP) property developments in Cape Verde and Canada, offering high returns with no risk to capital, to approximately 700 investors between 2006 and 2011.
Yorkshire provided Arck with banking facilities, and was supposed to hold investors’ money securely in segregated accounts.
But investors, having seen little or no returns, lost £45m when Arck entered liquidation in February 2012.
Alasdair Sampson, of law firm Financial Services Advocacy, has written to 18 Members of Parliament on behalf of 142 clients he acts for to complain about what he said are failures in the voluntary financial assistance scheme Yorkshire Bank set up in March following pressure from investors.
Only 13 of his cases have been settled in the seven months since the scheme was announced, according to Sampson.
Five cases have still not had a decision from the bank after up to 27 weeks from the submission of the claim and supporting evidence, he said.
A spokesperson for Yorkshire Bank said some cases are more complex than others and will take longer to work through.
He added that some of Sampson’s clients were also not eligible for financial help from the scheme, which is limited to “a number of people who invested in certain Arck investment schemes within specific timeframes”.
“All we had was a list of Arck investors, not the schemes [they were invested in]. We had to write to them to find out which scheme they were in. It was not a box ticking exercise,” said the bank’s spokesperson.
He would not provide details of which Arck investments were covered by the bank’s scheme, except to say Paradise Beach, Cape Verde claims were excluded.
Sampson said all 61 of his clients’ claims related to that project have been rejected, and accused the bank of “acting in bad faith from the outset” in inviting these claims, knowing they did not meet particular required criteria.
A spokesperson for Yorkshire Bank said: “Any suggestion that we have acted in ‘bad faith’ is without merit. We did not invite claims for those schemes.”
