http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/christie-blatchford/an-unkind-complicatedness/article1643419/Christie Blatchford
An unkind complicatedness
Amar Patel, who is suffering from breast cancer, lies in bed in her
apartment in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Patel is in a dispute with The
Bank of Nova Scotia over some holdings she wishes to redeem from the bank.
Amar Patel, who is suffering from breast cancer, lies in bed in her
apartment in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Patel is in a dispute with The
Bank of Nova Scotia over some holdings she wishes to redeem from the
bank. Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
What should have been a simple bank transaction required a trip from the
hospital
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Jul. 16, 2010
11:37PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Jul. 16, 2010 11:39PM EDT
In the end, nothing else would do for Scotiabank but that Amar Patel –
73 years old, bald from chemotherapy, in the throes of metastatic breast
cancer – should drag her aching bones down to the bank’s head office in
downtown Toronto.
The trip from her airy apartment above the Indian Rice Factory, the
landmark restaurant she founded in 1970 and has run ever since, was an
agony of no fewer than five transfers – from the hospital bed in her
living room to a commode, from commode to the chair lift for the first
set of stairs, from that chair to the next chair lift for the second
set, from that chair to a walker, from walker to the car.
This exercise took 59 minutes and the best efforts of her son Aman,
daughter-in-law Deepa and restaurant employee Chandan Sindhwal.
I should note that despite her illness and pain, Mrs. Patel, who hadn’t
been out of the apartment for almost two months, was gracious, beautiful
in a red-striped caftan and, but for occasional moans when the car hit a
rough patch of road, remarkably uncomplaining.
All she wanted was to do was take delivery of the silver the bank was
holding for her in the form of the certificates she’d bought decades
earlier.
It was, or ought to have been, an uncomplicated transaction.
Another major financial institution, TD Bank, managed to handle the same
transaction within a couple of days, and delivered the bullion to Mrs.
Patel’s local branch for pickup.
By this Thursday, Mrs. Patel had done the following to obtain
Scotiabank’s agreement to give her what is rightfully hers:
In early March, Aman, a Toronto criminal lawyer, had attended the
downtown headquarters to explain his mom’s situation. He suggested that
either a bank official go to her apartment to witness her signature (he
even offered to pick up and drive back the official) or consider meeting
his mother in the car outside the bank to save her a bit of the journey:
Both requests were rejected.
On March 17, Aman faxed the silver certificates to his mom’s local
Scotiabank branch and then drove his mother there; they were advised she
would have to attend the King/Bay office downtown.
For a time, Mrs. Patel gave up; she was hoping she could tackle it in a
few weeks or months, when she was better and had her strength back.
When that didn’t happen, she hired a Bay Street lawyer and, through him,
signed a power of attorney appointing Aman as her attorney.
In early July, Scotiabank asked first to “pre-inspect” the POA, then
demanded the original; then pronounced it unacceptable because it wasn’t
sealed; then insisted that a notarized copy, with covering letter from
the lawyer, be produced; finally, the notarized POA had to be submitted
to the home branch, then the bank’s legal department.
Even with these various approvals finally in place, Aman was told (being
a lawyer, he has notes of all these conversations and e-mails) that the
bank could still deny the transaction if it was deemed not to be in Mrs.
Patel’s “best interest.”
So she hired another lawyer, this time to help her get what was hers.
Then the bank said it had to decide if the transaction was to be for the
benefit of the attorney, from a business point of view. In other words,
Scotiabank would decide if the transaction made business sense – not
Mrs. Patel, or her lawyer, or Aman, who had her POA.
This Thursday, having heard nothing from the bank about whether it would
honour the now-approved and vetted POA, Aman called and got Judy
McBride, the head of customer service at King and Bay Streets. She told
him the bank would not honour the POA, and that Mrs. Patel had to come
down in person.
Aman again explained how weak his mother was, to no avail.
That afternoon, Aman, his wife and Chandan managed to carry out the five
transfers and get Mrs. Patel in the car.
Once they arrived downtown, Aman went in to ask, one last time, if
Scotiabank would at least dispatch people outside to do the signing in
the car; absolutely not, came the answer.
They got Mrs. Patel into the commode chair and into the lovely,
high-ceilinged headquarters with its polished marble floors they went.
Ms. McBride asked a number of questions, in my presence. Among them, “Do
you understand what this transaction is that is taking place? We’re
taking your certificates and giving you the actual bullion? Why would
you want to do that? It’s more difficult for you to cart around.”
At this point, Aman’s seemingly endless store of patience was exhausted
and he said, mildly I thought in the circumstances, “That’s none of your
business.”
Ms. McBride said that it was, that “simply putting a POA in place
doesn’t give carte blanche,” that the bank had a responsibility too, and
asked Mrs. Patel, “Why would you need the physical metal?”
Ms. McBride said the bank “reserves a right to ask questions” because,
she said, “We need a comfort level.”
Bank spokesman Joe Konecny denied the bank ever insisted Mrs. Patel had
to come in person, said they were “willing to act” on the POA, but that
“a heightened level of due diligence was required for a number of
reasons,” among them, bizarrely, that the transaction wasn’t initiated
at her home branch, although that branch had directed her downtown.
In any case, after about an hour, Mrs. Patel finally got her silver.
But it must have been a mortifying experience for this very dignified
woman to make such a trip in her bedclothes, and the whole thing struck
me as a profoundly condescending and arbitrary intrusion of bank
functionaries into Mrs. Patel’s and her family’s business. And what if
her son wasn’t a lawyer who knew how to fight back? What if she’d had a
stroke and wasn’t able to sign the documents?
If she wanted to buy crack cocaine with that silver, or sleep with it at
her side, that’s her call, because it belongs to her, not the bank. The
bully-boy functionaries might want to find a comfort level around that
notion.
