ON WEDNESDAY afternoon Lorna Abdy stood up in a room full of about 100 people in Townsville and told her story.
It had been a long day. The travelling circus of the federal Parliamentary inquiry and its cast of characters looking at Storm's collapse had barnstormed through Cairns the day before. The next day the hearing would move to Brisbane to hear Storm's founder, Emmanuel Cassimatis, explain his business model was appropriate for pensioners and retirees.
The room fell quiet as Mrs Abdy - a Charters Towers woman - said she was worried about her son, Raymond, a 29-year-old with an acquired brain injury after a car accident 11 years ago.
Through savings on his pension and the odd job, Raymond had $120,000. Through Storm, he was introduced to margin loans, which allow people to borrow against their money, and invested it all on the stockmarket.
This was the recipe for success in the Svengali-like education of the Storm model: clients were told, in the folksy advice offered by Storm, that they should not be eating their chickens but the eggs.
And in the full-blown version, you would mortgage your house, use the money as the collateral for a margin loan, and invest the lot in the stockmarket through an index fund based on the ASX 300.
And when they tried to leave you were belittled to the point of bullying.
Late last year Mr Abdy was asked to tip another $15,000 into his margin loan account, which peaked at a debt of $116,000.
All his savings - including the extra $15,000 - went in the great crash of 2008.
''In other words he's a very frightened boy. He doesn't know where he's going to go; nobody's going to employ him because he's got a disability,'' Mrs Abdy told the meeting.
Mrs Abdy and her husband, Darkie Abdy, were Storm clients themselves. Mrs Abdy lives on a carers' pension. Mr Abdy is a groundsman and teacher's aide. They have been left owing $360,000 on their house.
Soon that will be all gone as well.
The pervasive and devastating nature of Storm Financial's reach into communities was also revealed in a tearful address to the parliamentary committee.
A Cairns woman, Kate McColl, who has a seven-year-old and a four-year-old, fought back tears as she addressed the committee in Cairns to highlight what she called the ''network nature'' of the effects of the collapse. Mrs McColl said she was in the early stages of looking at the Storm Financial model, as was her brother, although neither of them had invested money through Storm.
''My parents are Storm Financial clients and I'm still working hard to keep the ownership of their home. They were retired and both of them have had to return to work in their late 60s,'' she said.
''My father's brother and his partner were also Storm Financial investment clients and they are also working hard to try and keep hold of their home. My step grandmother who lives in Sydney and is in her 80s was a Storm Financial investment client. We don't know how we will get her to meet her brand new great granddaughter born in July …
''Two of my mother's brothers have been to education seminars and were on the cusp of investing their own considerable life savings using the advice and products offered by Storm Financial.
''I know of an entire family - a retired mother and father, three of their adult children and their own children's families who were Storm clients. They are facing ruin.''
She said when Storm was performing well people liked to share prosperity and passed the information to family and friends.
''Now after the fact there are whole families caught up in this. They have very few financial resources,'' she said.
