Inside the Dover judgement Inside the Dover judgement Terry McMaster and Dover Financial have been hit with hefty fines despite the Federal Court failing to find an instance in which their actions harmed consumers. A A “In my view, the Client Protection Policy had real potential to mislead consumers into believing that they had no legal recourse against Dover in respect of financial advice given to them when that was not the case,” Justice O’Bryan said in his judgement. “Such an erroneous belief could have caused consumers very great loss. While the evidence shows that, in the period before the conduct was stopped by the intervention of ASIC, it was unlikely that consumers had suffered loss, the seriousness of the contravention must also be assessed by the loss that the conduct had the potential to occasion.”