BES blues for investors

Dear Editor,
We thought your readers may be interested in the following. My wife and I bank with BES and have invested in their product ‘Gestão de Carteiras’ or ‘GDC’.
One such product matured earlier this month and we were told by the local branch that the maturity proceeds would be automatically credited to our current account the next day.
Unfortunately this did not happen and, to cut a long story short, we discovered the proceeds have been blocked by the Bank of Portugal, which is in discussion with BES as to how all GDC investments should be handled following the collapse of the bank last month.
The net outcome is that we don’t know how much of our investment will be returned to us nor when. So if any of your readers have a similar type of investment with BES which, on maturity, has already been earmarked for a specific item of expenditure, they might need to consider an alternative source sooner rather than later in case the situation between the Bank of Portugal and BES takes a long time to resolve.
NAME AND ADDRESS WITHHELD