A fight to get your money out

I invested with Satrix a couple of years ago, my aim was to build up an investment in order to put down a deposit on a property. I recently purchased said property and needed the investment to cover deposit and transfer costs.

On 19 September I signed and sent through a repurchase instruction, I received no feedback from Satrix and was later told to resend the instruction, as they had "not received it". I did so and finally on 27 September I received an email of confirmation of receipt of the repurchase instruction. The email also required that I complete telephonic security questioning or screening, which was completed on the same day. On 29 September I received an email statement with the amounts I would be receiving and a cover letter saying that it would take 4-5 working days to receive the funds. By 10 October I had still not received anything from them and as such my representative called, to which they said they could not give her any information. I emailed them personally and received the usual automated response of "Dear Client your email has been received and you will receive a reply within 2 days" ...needless to say, I received no reply. Eventually I was asked to fill out the repurchase instruction again and send it through. This happened on 18 October. I was then asked by the same security gentleman to make a correction to the document, did so and resent it on 23 October. This time I received an automated reply saying that his Satrix mailbox was full, I sent the repurchase instruction to the generic Satrix email and also the mailbox was full (How do these people do business like this??). I phoned them and of course you get thrown from one person to the other. Eventually a lady helped me by giving me her personal work email and I could send through the document, which she forwarded to above mentioned gentleman. The next day I decided not to waste any more time and so I called the gentleman's office (as I had not received any response), he was not in, however his secretary gave me his email address, which happened to be incorrect as well, one of the poor IT guys got an earful/eyeful instead of the intended recipient. However this seemed to have worked as the IT guy forwarded my email to the intended gentleman and to top management.

The next day I received a phone call saying that Satrix would be completing the transaction that day and I should receive the funds in 5 working days, I requested that this matter be dealt with faster than that as I would be leaving the country in 4 days and if my money was not in I would be calling again, as you can imagine by now my faith in their 4-5day promise was little to none. Two days later I received my funds, this was 27 October, almost 6 weeks after I had submitted my initial instruction.

Now if Satrix T&C's had stated that it would take 6weeks to receive funds then this would not have been an issue, but since they specifically stated 4-5days, I do not understand what had taken them so long. Still to this day I have received no explanation as to why the process had taken so long, despite me asking for one.

Moral of the story, take your money elsewhere, as I had not even made an profit on my investment either. It sounds like Allan Gray is the way to go.