[Resolved]  Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund — Transfer of fund without consent

Address:

Bangalore, Karnataka

I wish to publish my bitter experience with a renowned American mutual fund company Franklin Templeton, whose chairman’s name appears in the list of billionaire’s club published by Forbes. However the Indian arm of this company does business in a most unethical way cheating the investor’s their hard earned investment. I lodged my complaint with SEBI as well as Ministry of Finance, Govt. of India, but they are reluctant to take any action probably they are made a salve by this company.

I am small time retail investor, invested Rs. 50000/- to “FMCG Fund-Growth” of Franklin Templeton on 22/07/2011. Surprisingly, on 14/09/2011, I received a mail stating my amount has been transferred to another fund viz. “Prima Plus” fund. Later I found, only Rs 48494.81/- out of investment of Rs. 50000/- was transferred to new fund. When contacted, I was informed that they have done this as they have merged two of their funds with SEBI permission and they claimed, that this was informed to me (never received any letter). I wrote to their top management viz. Mr. Sukumar Rajah and Mr. Vivek Kudva protesting this action resulting a loss of investment, as I was made investment for longtime goal and was not ready to lose any money due to early withdrawal. But they chose to ignore my complaints and their customer care sent an email explaining why they merged the funds and why they transferred my investment without my consent. While doing this, they sent me a back dated letter (dated 29th July delivered to me on 26th November) to cover-up their crime. In that letter the merger was informed and given option to withdraw investment without any exit load. If somebody doesn’t response (like me) that will be taken as consent and they will arbitrarily transfer investment.

Since this was their decision to merge the funds due to administrative or other benefit, why investor will suffer for their action? They are only fund manager and not owner, how SEBI give permission to a fund company to merge funds without investor’s consent particularly when the NAV is at lowest? This is a clear case of looting the investor’s in connivance with SEBI. I appeal to general investors NOT TO MAKE ANY INVESTMENT IN FRAKLIN TEMPLETON MUTUAL FUND and lose money like me. I wrote to CRISIL to downgrade rating of this fund house as risk of investor is greatest here.