Be careful using Travelex’s ‘buyback guarantee’

Once upon a time foreign exchange company Travelex used to offer a proper ‘buyback guarantee’ when you bought foreign currency from them. For an additional few pounds on top of the normal commission charge, you got a guarantee that they would buy any foreign currency you had left on your return at the same rate you paid for it. It was a service I often used when changing money at airports.

I hadn’t used Travelex for some time when I went to Denmark at the end of October. At Heathrow, as I had done so often in the past, I went to Travelex to buy, on this occasion, Danish kroner. I asked for a buyback guarantee, paid over the usual additional fee, and was told this would mean I would be able to change my money back at the ‘spot rate’ on the day. I assumed this meant the rate might move a bit in my favour or a bit against me.

Imagine my surprise when I tried to change back my remaining currency using the buyback guarantee, and found I was facing a loss of 27% (!). When I remonstrated with Travelex staff, they told me that a thrusting new CEO had moved into the company and that this virtual destruction of the buyback guarantee was one of his initiatives.

I wrote to Travelex to complain and said I felt I should have been warned at the outset that the ‘buyback guarantee’ no longer protected the customer, but they dismissed my comments, saying only that they would in future ask staff to ‘clearly communicate exchange rates before a purchase is confirmed’. If this means anything, it should require staff to say something like: ‘please be aware that purchasing this buyback guarantee will not protect you from suffering a substantial loss of perhaps 25% or more on any money you change back.’

Has anyone else had a similar experience to me?

Brexit and borders: a fantasy

One of the reasons our economy is being subjected to death by Brexit is, Theresa May and the Leave fanatics keep telling us, so that we can ‘take control of our borders’.

If we are foolish enough to leave the EU, the only land frontier between the UK and the EU will be the one between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. And how do the Brexiters propose to ‘take control’ of this border? By getting rid of it.

So while the Brexiters will proclaim they have slain the bete noire of Freedom of Movement in March 2019, any EU citizen who wants to enter the UK will simply have to go to the Irish Republic. Then they can take a bus, train, car, bicycle or just walk across the border into Northern Ireland and the UK is their oyster.

I heard some hapless government spokesman on the radio conceding that this was all true but saying it didn’t matter because the EU migrant would be detected by the authorities as soon as they tried to take a job or to rent a flat.

He wasn’t asked why then do we pay out millions and force people to wait in long queues to have their passports checked at Heathrow, other airports, ferry ports etc.

The Brexiters promised we could ‘take control’ of our borders but still have free movement between Northern Ireland and the Republic. (Anything else would probably wreck Northern Ireland's economy and its peace process.) Fourteen months after the referendum they still have no credible plan as to how this is to be achieved. 

And even if they had, there is no guarantee it would be acceptable to the EU.

World's deadliest terror attack on a single aircraft

On this day…..26 years ago, the deadliest act of terrorism involving a single aircraft happened thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ireland.     An Air India jumbo jet en route from Montreal to Heathrow was blown up, killing all 329 people on board.

The previous year, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, had been stormed by Indian troops, and the police investigation in Canada centred on Sikh extremists.   One, alleged to be the mastermind, was killed in a gun battle with Indian police in 1992.

It was not until 2000 that the first suspects were charged.    Inderjit Singh Reyat was sentenced to five years in prison, but two others were acquitted.    There were claims that some witnesses were intimidated, and that another was murdered before he could give evidence.

An official investigation published in 2010 was highly critical of the government, the police and the intelligence services, while in January of this year, Reyat was gaoled for nine years for perjuring himself to protect the two men who were acquitted.     For more, see A Disastrous History of the World.

Lockerbie - bomber or victim?

The only man convicted of Britain’s worst ever terrorist outrage has asked to be released from prison on compassionate grounds. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was jailed for 27 years for the Lockerbie bombing in 2001. His co-defendant was acquitted.

Al-Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal cancer, was alleged to have got the bomb onto PanAm Flight 103 in December 1988 via a connecting flight from Malta, though many people, including families of some of the 270 victims of the attack, are not convinced of his guilt, and believe he was the fall guy in a sordid stitch-up designed to end Libya’s diplomatic isolation.

In particular, sceptics have pointed to the fact that it was never mentioned at his trial that there had been a break-in at a Heathrow baggage store just 18 hours before flight 103 departed, and that someone could have smuggled a bag on board by getting it into this area.

Al-Megrahi is appealing against the verdict, and in June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission said it feared he may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. If his conviction were to be overturned it would, of course, raise some very inconvenient questions.