Today I got an email regarding a settlement in a so called class-action. In brief it says that I - still in 2018 - will get a preliminary payment of 70% of the expected final agreed amount. It all relates to some shares of the company Fortis I held in 2008

A class action is a claim on behalf of a group of people and in Europe this does not exist but we have something similar.
This case was against the former bank insurer Fortis (Belgium/Netherlands) whose shares became worth almost zero after they had taken over a Dutch bank ABN AMRO (Netherlands) for a price that at that moment was considered too high while at the same time internally large issues with both Fortis and ABNAMRO became known. If I remember correctly this was not shared with investors in time. (RBS and Banco Santander were also taking over parts of ABNAMRO)

What drove these Belgium gangsters banksters?

The Board of Fortis partly consisted of former ABNAMRO "crown-princes" who earlier were considered not good enough by the Dutch bank to become King so they had transfered to Fortis instead. This take-over had to be their ultimate revenge but in the end it was proven right as they clearly were not capable enough to be even princes.

The write off of intangibles related to the highly priced take-over (goodwill) together with other write offs no longer hideable caused a run on the bank. Liquidity problems started and the rest is history.

The two governments bailed-out the two bankinsurers at the risk of the tax payers (which worked out very fine ultimately) and shareholders lost 80% of their money. Now ten years later I am partly compensated hoorah!

Time to maybe buy some extra crypto and loose it again?

Goldrooster