LONDON (AP) — Standard Life Assurance Ltd. has been fined £2.45 million ($4 million) for misleading marketing of an investment fund, the Financial Service Authority said yesterday.

Some 98,000 people had invested in the company's Pension Sterling Fund, the agency said, but were not correctly informed about risks.

Marketing material stated that "the fund is invested wholly in cash, the most stable investment", the FSA said. Cash, in this sense, could include interest-bearing bank accounts, government bonds and Treasury bills — investments which do not fluctuate in value.

However, up to 80 percent of the fund was invested in floating rate notes, a riskier investment.

The risk was demonstrated by the fund's drop in value by 4.8 percent, or about £100 million, by January of last year.

Standard Life covered the loss by paying £102.7 million into the fund, the FSA noted.

The FSA said fine was 30 percent below the maximum because Standard Life cooperated fully in the investigation.

Standard Life Assurance Ltd. is a unit of Standard Life PLC, based in Edinburgh, which had £156.6 billion of assets under administration at the end of last year.

"We have learned important lessons from this mistake and have made significant improvements to our marketing literature processes to prevent the same thing happening again," said Barry Cameron, head of media relations at Standard Life.

"When our own internal review identified problems with some of our literature in February last year, we immediately apologised to customers and injected over £100 million into the fund to compensate them for their losses from the sudden fall in unit price."