Victims of the safety deposit box heists at three FNB branches have reacted with outrage following the bank's “measly” settlement offers for their losses.
Most of the offers appeared to be below 20%, with some even less than 10%, of the value of the stolen items. FNB had no explanation on how they had arrived at the amounts.
Ayanda Ntlabathi, whose valuables worth at least R500 000 were stolen from the Parktown branch, said he was shocked with the bank's “measly” R1690 for his losses.
“After they sent me a letter last week confirming how much they had offered me, I contacted them to ask if they had made a mistake. I really thought they had left out a zero or something.”
Ntlabathi also lost a handful of sentimental items which were also in the safety deposit box.
“I have items that my grandfather left for me. There is no way you can put a value on such items. I was heartbroken to lose them but FNB told me there was no way they could reimburse me for those items either.”
In September 2015, several safety deposit boxes were stolen from FNB in Sunnyside, Pretoria, and on December 18 last year, 360 boxes were raided in a brazen overnight break-in at the Randburg branch.
Two weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, thieves penetrated an FNB vault in Parktown and made off with R1.7m in cash and valuables from about 30 deposit boxes.
Ntlabathi said he had contacted FNB several times since he had received the settlement offer but it had failed to respond.
“I want to find out how they came up with an amount like that considering what I had lost, but nobody has come back to me.
"I wasn’t expecting the whole amount but this is just ludicrous.
“It’s uncalled for. They were negligent and they are liable.”
Bradley Naidoo, who also had a safety deposit box broken into during one of the heists, said he was shocked by the bank's treatment.
“It is sad that FNB can treat us this way. The settlement I received wasn’t even a quarter of the value which we could prove, not counting family inheritance”
Heist victims’ group organiser Kelly Fraser, whose dad’s safety deposit box was hit in the Randburg robbery, said the group were prepared to take their case all the way to the Constitutional Court.
“The group is sticking together to fight this and we will take it as far as we need to get decent settlements,” he said.
Fraser's dad lost an estimated R1m of Krugerrands. She said the settlement made by FNB was an "insult".
“The group is angry, disgusted and disappointed, especially because we were led to believe in our meetings and correspondence with FNB that they genuinely wanted to help their customers. They stated at the beginning of the process: ‘We understand that this is a very difficult time and trust that this gesture will demonstrate our commitment to you as our customer.’
“These offers in no way demonstrate their commitment to their customers and this has made an already difficult situation even more traumatising for the victims.”
Fraser said the bank was counting on getting “desperate victims” to take an offer well below the value of the items they had lost. “Despite their public relations' responses, where the bank said it will pay up to 80%, this only applied to a handful of victims from certain branches.
"For our 200-strong group, we received offers of only 11% on average. Some are as low as 0.1% or nothing at all,” Fraser said.
FNB Points of Presence chief executive Lee-Ann van Zyl said the bank had made individual settlement offers “despite not being legally obliged to do so”.
“We never want to throw the legal book at customers but the reality is that every customer signed terms and conditions. We are not legally obliged to give the customers settlement offers but we also know that some of those items are replaceable. We realise that, and for that reason, we wanted to make a payment to our clients."
Van Zyl added that not all heist victims were “unhappy” with the settlements offered.
“I think unhappy is a very broad term. We are dealing with every customer on a case-to-case basis. We have done this from the start. We allocated a customer to an individual, dedicated consultant.
"We also got independent assessors and insurers to reassess every case. On the grounds of that, we made the payment to our customers.”
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