mortgage rip off

Started by conair, August 03, 2012, 19:46:57 PM

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ocart

Hi conair. Did not hear of any new developments regarding Court judgements. I am going to fill out the complaints form and hand it in to Solbank when I am there in April   Have you sent in a form? 

TheCooler

I haven't filled out a complaints form . In light of Sarah's reduction I wrote 3 weeks ago to Martina , I mentioned that I had heard that they had reduced one collar restriction & would they re-consider reducing mine in line with this.
I received a reply a week later in Spanish from customer services , not the atlantico branch,refusing my request.
My only option available now is legal action ,if I wish to see a reduction.
I am out in April and will make a decision then.


ocart

Thanks fifi for your post.   I am wondering where I can contact the local office or should I go through a local solicitor

Michael

fifi

#94
Hi Michael, to be honest I havent kept up to speed on what is happening with the ground clauses because I had a break from the Forum for a while. I found this article when I was trying to catch up on some of the subjects that I was interested in and posted it here for those who I knew were interested. As far as I can remember ADICAE were representing groups of people of five or more.   I havent read up on the other organisation yet so know nothing about them. Do you speak Spanish? If you do I would get in touch with the Cabildo and ask for some more information and send them the link so they know what you are referring to.  It might be cheaper to use one of the Consumer organisations like Adicae or the other one mentioned if they are representing groups of people rather than using a Lawyer but I do not know for sure. I think from memory that you are Caleta based. If you dont speak Spanish perhaps Captain Sensibles son or Annette from Woodside tradings son might be able to translate for you if you asked them. The best of luck. :)

PS. Sorry you asked me for an address. I dont know the address Michael but I am sure if you PM  either Captain Sensible or Admin they will be able to help you. Send the link so you get the right office.


fifi

#96
Bank in Canaries rapped by court for 'abusive' mortgage conditions
The war on banks over their unfair mortgage conditions continues to produce victories for customers, this time in Las Palmas, where judges have ruled that the imposition by a local bank of a so-called 'floor clause' was an abuse of its position.





Las Palmas - 12.12.2014 - The court ruled this week that a home-loan contract between the Caja Rural bank and a client in which the lowest interest rate the latter could pay was 5% was "unfair". Judges ordered it to repay the customer over 10,000 euros in excess payments and slammed the bank for not passing on the benefits of the downward trend in interest rates in force at the time the mortgage was taken out in 2010. In a hard-hitting judgement, the court accused Caja Rural of a "lack of transparency" in its floor clause practices, which it said were "obscure" and placed borrowers at a serous disadvantage. The ruling is the latest in a long line of decisions that have gone against banks in the Canaries for inserting minimum rate clauses in loan agreements.





Island connections article.

ocart

Thanks again fifi  The banks will have to bite the bullet on this thing eventually but it will probably be long and drawn out. 

Michal

steveDeb

#98
Solbank  mortgage, this week I have been offered a 1.65 per cent fixed mortgage free of charge to replace my variable
mortgage with which currently has a 2 percent floor rate. In my view Why am I been offered a fixed rate mortgage out of the blue.

A couple of years ago I got the floor rate reduced to 4 percent then last year asked the floor rate be reduced to 2 percent  on both occasion it was reduced with out charge just for going into Solbank and asking .

I am now looking for a draft letter to claim all the years of back interest from the illegal floor rates. . Has any
One managed to claim back over paid interest yet??????
spthomas

decho

Quote from: steveDeb on March 25, 2016, 18:38:41 PM
Solbank  mortgage, this week I have been offered a 1.65 per cent fixed mortgage free of charge to replace my variable
mortgage with which currently has a 2 percent floor rate. In my view Why am I been offered a fixed rate mortgage out of the blue.

A couple of years ago I got the floor rate reduced to 4 percent then last year asked the floor rate be reduced to 2 percent  on both occasion it was reduced with out charge just for going into Solbank and asking .

I am now looking for a draft letter to claim all the years of back interest from the illegal floor rates. . Has any
One managed to claim back over paid interest yet??????

I reckon this is a bigger scandal than PPI in the UK and if claims ARE successful will do serious damage to the banks possibly bringing them to their knees...and I wonder if the Spanish Government will bail them out. The costs must be HUGE!
So I doubt they are going to make it easy....

fifi


Next Shoe to Drop on Spanish Banks
by Don Quijones • April 10, 2016   
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“The mortgage ‘floor clauses` are a fraud.”
By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET.

Thursday, April 7, 2016, could go down in history as a great day for Spanish mortgage holders and a very grim one for many Spanish banks, thanks to a new ruling that the so-called mortgage floor-clauses that were unleashed across the whole financial sector in 2009 are abusive (but not illegal) and lack transparency.

These floor clauses set a minimum interest rate â€" typically of between 3% and 4.5% â€" for variable-rate mortgages, even if the Euribor drops far below that figure. In other words, the mortgages are only really variable in one direction: upwards!

Following the latest ruling, the banks named in the suit must reimburse clients all the money they`ve surreptitiously overcharged them since May 2013. And if they want to continue applying floor clauses in the future, the banks must do so in an open and transparent manner, which pretty much defeats the purpose, since if banks were completely up front about the inclusion of floor clauses in their contracts and what that actually means to the mortgage holder, no one in their right mind would accept them.

Thursday`s ruling comes on the heels of a similar sentence by Spain`s Supreme Court in October 2013. But whereas the Supreme Court ruling applied to just three banks, the new one applies to almost all of them. It is also the first time that such a large class action suit, with over 15,000 claimants, has been successful. It is now broadly assumed â€" meaning by everyone except the banks and their lawyers â€" that the ruling has set a legal precedent that should now apply to all of the 2.5 million mortgage holders affected by the abusive (but not illegal) practice.

“The banking system is going to resist, but we can tell every client not to pay a single euro more to the banks,” warned Manuel Pardos, the president of the Spanish Association of Consumers and Users of Banks, Saving Banks, Insurance and Financial Products (Adicae), the driving force behind the legal battle to ban floor clauses.

“The floor clauses are a fraud,” he added, but given that they bring in a huge amount of money, some of the banks “will try to hold onto them as long as they can.”

True to form, Catalonia-based Banc de Sabadell, the only major Spanish bank to continue using floor clauses in its mortgages, has already announced its intention to appeal the ruling, claiming that the clauses in their contracts that outline the impact of interest-rate floors are “clear-cut.” In recent months the bank has been pressuring its mortgage customers to sign a “pact of silence,” by which the customers, knowingly or not, pledge never to speak publicly about the conditions of their mortgage â€" not even to their lawyers â€" and in return the bank removes the floor clause from the mortgage, without reimbursing a single cent of what it owes.



Sabadell, along with 40 other Spanish banks, has good reason to be concerned about the new ruling. According to Fernando Herrero, the general secretary of Adicae, the floor clauses have cost the average user “some â,¬2,000 per year,” meaning the banks will have to pay back “some billions” to customers.

The financial consultancy firm Analistas Financieros Internacionales (AFI) tried to put a more precise figure on it. The amount they came up with was â,¬5.26 billion. But that`s only going back to May 2013, when Spain`s Supreme Court changed the law, effectively banning the current use of floor clauses. At the time, the court argued that the law couldn`t be applied retroactively to 2009, when the banks began introducing the clauses, since it would potentially cripple their finances.

The latest ruling adopts the same reasoning, but not everybody agrees.

Most importantly, the European Commission believes that the refunds should extend all the way back to the first mortgage payments, the rationale being that if a clause is declared void, “it is so from its origin.” On April 26, the European Court of Justice is scheduled to rule on the matter. If it rules in favor of applying the law retroactively, the banks will end up owing many more billions. AFI`s estimate is â,¬4.47 billion, but it could be a lot more.

The fallout is already having a serious impact on balance sheets as some â€" but not all â€" banks try to provision for the big payback. Last year, two of Spain`s biggest banks, Bankia and Caixabank, reported declines in a key profit metric when they stopped applying the interest-rate floors.

For its part, Banco Popular, Spain`s sixth biggest bank, announced 2015 earnings of â,¬105 million, 68% down from the previous year, after having provisioned â,¬350 million to cover interest payment refunds for over 100,000 customers. Without the floor clause in its mortgages with which to gouge its customers, the bank is expected to earn â,¬80 million less on its margins per year, every year from now on.

The same goes for all the other banks â€" with the exception of the one bank that refused to apply floor clauses to its mortgages, Bankinter, and Santander, which stopped using them straight after the 2013 ruling. In a delicious irony, all the other banks that continued to apply them will now have to learn to survive without the one mechanism that protected them from the profit-shrinking effects of the ECB`s negative interest rate policies  â€" just when the Euribor goes negative!

For 2016 alone the disappearance of the floor clause is expected to set the banks back over â,¬2 billion in margins, followed by a further â,¬4 billion between 2017 and 2019. Whether they are ready to adapt to this new reality depends on two key factors: the ruling adopted by the European Court of Justice, on April 26; and the extent to which the banks have provisioned for the day after.

The bank most at risk is Banc de Sabadell, according to analysts at Bankinter. It has apparently done less than most other banks to provision its exposure.

If there are casualties along the way, as the Spanish financial daily Expansión points out, the floor-clause drama could end up providing the perfect pretext for massively consolidating Spain`s banking sector, a long-cherished goal of both the ECB and Europe`s biggest financial institutions. As such, the biggest winners will end up being Europe`s top-tier banks, in particular Santander, Spain`s only Systemically Important Financial Institution. No doubt, the Spanish taxpayer will be on hand to fill any balance-sheet holes.



paul and sue

We have been following this article with interest for months now, 2 weeks ago we received an email from Solbank offering us a fixed rate mortgage of 3% for the remainder of our term. Having read these messages we contacted Solbank and asked why we were being offered 3% fixed and other people had been offered fixed rates with a lower percentage than that. We were advised by the Bank that it depended on the amount left outstanding and the amount of years left to pay ! Please does anyone have any thoughts on this ? Thanks Paul and Sue

fifi

 It seems that there are lower mortgage prices if you agree to take out insurance policies etc with the bank. I guess if you are offered a Mortgage ask to see the small print. Often the Subrogacion fee (fee for changing mortgage provider in the future ) can vary greatly too so worth having a look in detail at everything and shop around for the best deal.

This is an article about the variation in fixed prices with a Bankiter mortgage which may throw a little light on the subject Paul and Sue. It is also possible to get your Lawyer to negotiate a good deal for you with the Banks and sometimes get certain charges like opening fees dropped.

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.ie&sl=es&tl=en&u=http://www.canarias7.es/articulo.cfm%3Fid%3D416330&usg=ALkJrhgREQShOTag6LIuBfguznwXA3e-Sg

fifi

#103
Another little update here if anyone would like to see what Adicae (The Consumer association for Banking) have to say on the current offers being made by the banks. https://translate.google.ie/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.afectadosclausulasuelo.org%2Fofertas-bancos.php&edit-text=&act=url

The main website in Spanish.http://www.afectadosclausulasuelo.org/ Clicking on the Icons brings you to the various sections .

In one section it shows details of all of the cases won against various banks and the outcome so there may be something worth having a look at if anyone is interested in reading it.

TheCooler

#104
Quote from: paul and sue on April 19, 2016, 15:40:31 PM
We have been following this article with interest for months now, 2 weeks ago we received an email from Solbank offering us a fixed rate mortgage of 3% for the remainder of our term. Having read these messages we contacted Solbank and asked why we were being offered 3% fixed and other people had been offered fixed rates with a lower percentage than that. We were advised by the Bank that it depended on the amount left outstanding and the amount of years left to pay ! Please does anyone have any thoughts on this ? Thanks Paul and Sue

Was over in March , and popped into Solbanks Atlantico branch to get a replacement card. I was taken aside and offered a rate 4% for the life of the term. I refused this offer.
The cashier had a list of names she was due to contact.
I intend to sit tight,& watch how this plays out over the coming months, before deciding on what course of action to take.


fifi

EU court adviser offers relief for Spanish banks on mortgage floors


(Reuters) - The European Court of Justice advocate general on Wednesday said a Spanish court ruling capping banks' liabilities for so-called floor clauses in mortgage contracts was right, offering a relief for banks which had feared multi-million euros compensations.

The European court still has to issue a ruling on the issue but it generally follows the recommendations of its adviser.

Shares in several Spanish banks which still have the clauses in their mortgage contracts, including Liberbank, Banco Popular, Sabadell and Caixabank, rose after the adviser's recommendations were made public.

conair

Has anybody successfully had any money refunded by solbank bancosabadell in view of the mortgage floor clauses if so which lawyers did they use.
Thanks.

sarah1312

Just an Update I have been contacted by a company Leyland CC (must have got my details from White Bios??) whom I used to start my claim to see if I want them to reclaim my money from the illegal floor clause!!!

Has anyone actually managed to get a refund?

This company are just like the PPI companies in the UK they want 25 to 28% BUT when I told her we had already signed something in the bank and had my rate reduced she was not daunted she told me unless we went to the Notary it was not legal (we did not) I have therefore just contacted the bank and copied in her letter asking them if they are willing to refund this money and if not I am going to use this company I thought I may as well try myself 1st but if not I am going with them 28% or not its no win no claim so I am not going to lose anything  Have pasted the email she sent below

Sarah Haughian - La Siesta

sarah1312

Sorry it wont let me cut and paste the letter but this is the company

www.lexland.es
Sarah Haughian - La Siesta

sarah1312

WOW that was quick just had following reply from the bank
Good afternoon,

I am afraid but we can not accept this mail as you are requesting. You have to put your self in contact with the customer services in the bank´s web or personally here in the branch with a writing complain and original signature.

email to contact:  Sac@bancsabadell.com

best regards
Sarah Haughian - La Siesta

jill tie

Hi Sarah,

I wouldn't entertain using a 3rd party.  This forum will probable be your best source of information.
Not sure of your personal circumstance but on a 108,000 euro mortgage Ive been told the claim
could be approx 10K (25 years taken out in 2005).  So the thought of giving 2800 euro to someone
else does't appeal to me.  Good luck

Johnrgby2

Quote from: jill tie on February 20, 2017, 08:30:49 AM
Hi Sarah,

I wouldn't entertain using a 3rd party.  This forum will probable be your best source of information.
Not sure of your personal circumstance but on a 108,000 euro mortgage Ive been told the claim
could be approx 10K (25 years taken out in 2005).  So the thought of giving 2800 euro to someone
else does't appeal to me.  Good luck

Jill
it is 28% and about in line with what The Shysters, {Sorry Solicitors} were charging in The UK 8/9 years ago.

conair

Hi
Solbank are now offering to scrap the floor clauses with immeadiate effect but want you to sign away any compensation claim.Has any body else been told the same or has anybody managed to geta anywhere nearer a refund.

Windermeregolfer

Not that it affects us,  but there is at least one other thread running on this subject -

http://www.fuerteventura-forum.com/index.php?topic=22489.0 

-so check those out as well

jill tie

Quote from: conair on February 20, 2017, 12:09:50 PM
Hi
Solbank are now offering to scrap the floor clauses with immeadiate effect but want you to sign away any compensation claim.Has any body else been told the same or has anybody managed to geta anywhere nearer a refund.

I was asked to sign away in exchange for the floor clause being removed last May.   I refused and after a couple of months it was removed anyway.  Back then I thought it was totally wrong of the bank and told them so.  Now after the courts ruling if the banks are still asking people to sign away their rights then its bordering on criminal. 

If the banks have no more appeals then they must comply.  I think its will people will start getting offers soon.  Probable reduce your mortgage rather than a refund as I don't think many of the banks can afford so many large payouts.

F1REFLY999

Visted Solbank Caleta today to speak to the manager, after waiting in a queue for 30 minutes I was advised that there was updates, over the weekend to the process that the manager had not had the chance to look at as yesterday was a holiday. I have a further meeting tomorrow morning giving her the chance to fully understand the new process, and she will also complete a claim form when I am in the office.
La luciérnaga

Please visit www.costacaleta.co.uk

F1REFLY999

La luciérnaga

Please visit www.costacaleta.co.uk

F1REFLY999

Further update

Went in to see the manager at Solbank Caleta today, had to fill in a claims form (no official forms) so had to borrow a piece of paper and a pen. Wanted my mortgage details and an official signature, stamped and sent off to their customers service department. I asked for the floor clause to be removed instantly but was told I would have to wait to see what the customer service department said :o

She did state that's the claim only went back to 2013.....we will see what develops!
La luciérnaga

Please visit www.costacaleta.co.uk

conair

Has any body had any official response from solbank having formally asked for a refund of there mortgage floor over charges.?