Victims of the Norton Motorcycles pension scandal have finally been paid £9.4m in compensation more than a decade after they had seemingly lost their life savings.
The move represents some long-awaited good news for more than 200 people who fell victim to what is known as a pensions liberation fraud during 2012 and 2013, when they were tricked into allowing about £11.5m to be transferred out of their retirement plans.
Their retirement savings were then switched by the owner of Norton Motorcycles into his own business, where the money appears to have been spent paying the people behind the liberation scam, buying cryptocurrencies and making cash withdrawals.
The Fraud Compensation Fund paid £9.4m to the collapsed schemes in March but the cash remained inaccessible to the victims as Dalriada, the trustee appointed by the Pensions Regulator in 2019 to manage the Norton schemes, calculated how much each pension scheme member was owed.
Payments were finally received into accounts set up for each victim last week, according to members contacted by the Guardian, although some of those affected did not live long enough to receive the award.
Billy Wallace, 59, said he was delighted to have received about £33,000 of compensation paid into a new personal Standard Life account, although he estimates his pension fund would now have been worth as much as £60,000 without the fraud. He should be able to withdraw the compensation within the coming weeks.
“I’ve seen the printout, so I know it’s there,” he said. “But we have been through that much, until I see it in my own bank account that’s when I’ll believe it,” he said.
Most of the victims’ original retirement funds were transferred into three Norton pension schemes and then vanished after being switched directly into Norton’s business, a heritage British motoring brand that dates back to the 19th century and has boasted high-profile devotees including Che Guevara and the Keanu Reeves.
The news of the compensation payment follows years of reporting on the scandal by the Guardian, which exposed how senior government ministers feted a businessman called Stuart Garner, who acquired Norton with £1m borrowed directly from a pension fraud, received a further £10m that was raised via the pension liberation scam, and then illegally invested that pension money into his own business.
Norton collapsed into administration in January 2020 and five months later the Pensions Ombudsman ordered Garner to make a “restorative payment” to all of the scheme members, then thought to total about £14m including interest.
The businessman was also told to pay a further £180,000 to 30 complainants for “exceptional maladministration causing injustice”, and the ombudsman stated that Garner had acted “dishonestly”.
After the decision, Garner filed for bankruptcy, leaving the Fraud Compensation Fund, a statutory public corporation accountable to parliament, as the only viable method for providing some recompense to the victims.
In 2022, Garner pleaded guilty to illegally investing millions of pounds of people’s retirement savings into his own businesses. He received an eight-month prison sentence, suspended for two years. He has always insisted he is also a victim.
Garner’s conviction represented a huge fall from grace for the entrepreneur, who had used Norton’s brand to secure himself a cameo role in the 2015 James Bond film Spectre and travelled with a government trade mission to China on Theresa May’s jet when she was prime minister.
Norton was bought out of administration in April 2020 and has since begun marketing bikes as a separate business under new ownership.
