Equitable Life - key quotes

Equitable came close to collapse in 2000

A damning report highlights a "decade of regulatory failure" around the near-collapse of Equitable Life.

Parliamentary Ombudsman Ann Abraham says ministers should apologise to policyholders and set up a compensation fund.

The long-awaited report is the latest development in the scandal that left more than a million policyholders with reduced retirement savings.

Here some of the key figures give their views.

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Ann Abraham - Parliamentary Ombudsman

The government should establish and fund a compensation scheme to assess the losses of these individuals, and they should set up a scheme that's independent, which is transparent, which is simple and that should happen speedily - within two years of a decision to set up a scheme.

I have alerted Parliament to the injustice which I have found in this case resulted from serial maladministration on the part of the former Department of Trade and Industry, the Government Actuary's Department and the Financial Services Authority.

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Vanni Treves - current Equitable chairman

We've compensated all those policy holders to whom we owed a debt and we've paid them hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of millions of pounds, through rectification schemes, compensation schemes, the financial ombudsman service.

So we've done the right thing we believe as a society to our policyholders. We think it is high time that the government did the right thing.

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Paul Braithwaite - Equitable Members Action Group (EMAG)

It is red letter day for both EMAG and indeed the million plus aggrieved and outraged people who invested in Equitable Life throughout the 1990s. She [Ms Abraham] has vindicated everything that we suspected.

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Treasury spokesman

The length and complexity of the report mean it would be inappropriate to comment before giving it our full and careful consideration.

We expect to provide a full response to the House [of Commons] in the autumn.

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Vince Cable - Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman

Gordon Brown has overseen a complete and repeated failure of regulation spanning a decade.

The outrage expressed by policyholders over this "serial regulatory failure" is entirely justified.

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George Osborne - shadow chancellor

We are glad that the report accepts the principle that there should be payments to those who lost out.

The job now is to assess how much those payments should be and to whom they should be paid.

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John Livey - policyholder

We are getting an income from our pension of 24% less than what we started with in 1998. It has been quite a stressful time.