Penalty charges? Remember them...?
It's certainly been all quiet on the penalty charges front for a while now, but it seems that someone is determined to not let it lie!
The HBOS bank will be in the High Court in Leeds next week to defend its refusal to obey 11 court orders to repay bank charges owed to some of its customers.
HBOS is having to defend itself due to an application for a winding-up order lodged against it by Robertson Holbrook, a penalty charges claims management company acting on behalf of the 11 customers.
At the last minute, HBOS has obtained an injunction against the order which it says is "ridiculous".
Robertson Holbrook says HBOS (the owner of the Halifax and Bank of Scotland) has regularly failed to obey the county court's decision that it should repay the customers a total of £50,000 of charges due to them.
"They have done nothing about the eleven judgments against them," said company spokesman Tim Russell.
A spokesman for HBOS said that the application for a winding-up order had been an abuse of the court process.
"It is ridiculous, we made £6bn last year," he said. "We have moved to have a stay applied in the light of the OFT case," he explained.
As well as saying that the bank had already paid the claimants £21,000, he said HBOS wanted payment of the rest deferred until the outcome of next year's High Court test case involving the Office of Fair Trading and the banking industry.
This will attempt to settle whether or not hundreds of thousands of you have been illegally charged punitive overdraft fees on their current accounts.
Since then, in courts up and down the country, the banks have been allowed to ask individual judges if they would stay, or halt, any current or new cases, until the outcome of the case; in many areas judges have agreed to this approach.
But HBOS appears to be taking the argument a step further, claiming that a stay should be applied even to cases which it has already lost in a county court.
"We do have the right to have them stayed after the original hearing in the county court, because they were all judgments in default," said the bank's spokesman.
He explained that for various reasons the bank had failed to turn up and argue its case at the original hearings in early August.
Robertson Holbrook accused HBOS of delaying to avoid paying up:
"Up until the statutory demand to pay up or be wound up, three weeks, ago they ignored all our correspondence," said Mr Russell. "We will attempt to have the injunction overturned as they still have not offered to pay up," he added.
Winding up orders are usually pursued, as an alternative to sending in bailiffs, where a company cannot pay its debts because it is insolvent.
(But bailiffs have already gone after banks over penalty charges!)
Naturally there is no doubt that in this case, the HBOS is solvent and very profitable, but it is still open to anyone who is owed money to threaten to wind up a company under the provisions of the 1986 insolvency act.
So, it's that someone is trying to wind up wind up a bank for a change, as they seem to wind us up all the time!
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