GROUND CLAUSE: BANK’S NEW STRATEGY

The Spanish Supreme Court delivered recently a Judgement about ground clauses. After this Judgement, most Judges have cancelled almost 100% of ground clauses in the mortgages of the claims lodged into the Courts (provided that the grounds of the claim are that the client was not informed about the mentioned ground clause).

After that, some of the banks have decided to keep offering the product, but informing the client about the importance of the ground clause. The client can decide then if he/she is interested in having this type of clause in his/her mortgage.

Now the problem is with all the ground clauses that the bank signed and that clients are now claiming. If the Court decides that the ground clause is not valid, the bank will have to cancel it and will have to pay the interests charged since September 2013.  There are some banks that have stopped charging the ground clause without signing any document agreeing to cancel the clause.

This new strategy is not meant to benefit the client; in fact it is a fraudulent strategy to prevent their clients from suing the bank. This also allows the bank to claim interests of the ground clause retroactively and to start charging the client with this clause in the future.

I had various cases in which the bank stopped applying the ground clause and then refused to sign any document cancelling the clause. In addition to that, after suing the bank for cancelling the ground clause in the mortgage, the bank refused to sign any agreement even if the bank was no longer charging the client with the ground clause.

This confirms that it is their new strategy to buy time and avoid being sued and that they will wait for charging it again in the future and will claim the owed interests.