By CATHERINE MASTERS
British newspaper the Mail On Sunday is warning people to be wary of depositing money with a London organisation aligned to a group that has set up camp in the South Island backblocks.
The Weekend Herald last week published an inside look at Takaro Lodge, near Te Anau, which is setting up a luxury health resort and also offers a range of health services and claims to be able to heal some serious illnesses.
It is home to a number of foreign students and has elicited strong reaction among locals ranging from concerns about the nature of its training to support, including from the mayor, for the investment it has brought to the area.
Takaro Lodge is a sister organisation to the Energy Bank in London. Both were set up by Chinese healer Aiping Wang and her Croatian businessman husband, Aleksandar Fulepp, who now spend much of their time in Fiordland.
The lodge is managed by Englishwoman Sarah McCrum, who was managing director of the Energy Bank when the Mail last year raised questions about its advertising.
In the Mail money column, financial adviser Tony Hetherington looked into an Energy Bank brochure offering feng shui, healing sessions, massage, relaxation - and which also said it could solve business and money problems.
"If so then I suppose its prices aren't as astronomic as they seem - £280 [$842] for an hour with an instructor and £1600 [$4816] an hour for a Grand Master."
Mr Hetherington said he became concerned about the brochure's saying the organisation was called the Energy Bank because it operated like a bank. It said people deposited a lump sum and got a discount on prices, plus interest.
The brochure claimed clients could earn and save significantly better by depositing money in the Energy Bank than in a conventional bank.
A British Financial Services Authority spokesman told the Mail that, under the Banking Act, the Energy Bank was not an authorised bank, so customers did not have deposit protection.
Ms McCrum was quoted as saying the deposits were not refundable.
"They are really payment in advance for sessions and training."
She said the brochure had been replaced, but Mr Hetherington wrote that he was still dissatisfied with the Energy Bank's pitch.
Yesterday, Ms McCrum said the Mail article was dated and the writer had made "a little bit of a game" of the story.
"It was made clear in all our publicity that the bank part is like a bank of energy, it's a place where you circulate energy, and lots of people don't understand what that means and what energy is, and this and that, but that's another problem," she told the Weekend Herald.
The company had been only "lightly rapped" by the Financial Services Authority, told to remove a phrase and put inverted commas around the word bank.
The brochure was not used here, finances were organised differently and the purpose of Takaro Lodge was different, with an emphasis on student training and research.
Ms McCrum denied as "totally untrue" local John Smart's claims in the Weekend Herald story that up to 50 of the group had been out looking for two young people who had gone "missing".
Mr Smart also said he had offered a group runaway a lift. The man apparently told him: "Anywhere, mate, would be better than where I've been."
Ms McCrum said the man had returned to the lodge and asked if he could stay for a year.
The lodge offers short-term training, but many clients are long-stay and follow a regime of early rises, physical labour and intensive "energy sessions", which reporter Kimberley Paterson detailed last week.
Ms McCrum objected to the lodge being described in the Weekend Herald as a "compound". She said it was, in fact, a paradise.
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