Ibercaja

 Hi there, I´m a newbie on the forum, although I´ve been in Spain 10 years and I just wanted to get your thoughts on our situation:

5 years ago my wife took out a 10,000€ loan with Ibercaja to pay for the 5% deposit on our house. We got a bit of a rough deal on our mortgage with Caja Madrid and are paying 1.25% above Euribor. To cut a very long story short, after 7 ECB rate rises on the bounce, our monthly mortgage repayments increased by 80%. We spoke to the bank to see if we could negotiate a lower interest rate but they weren´t interested. 

As a result we started falling behind on our repayments to Ibercaja, something had to give somewhere. We´d quit smoking, we don´t drink, we don´t go to restaurants but we just couldn´t afford to pay everything. As our 3rd child was due in November 2008 we thought we could pay the arrears with the 2500€ the government award families when they have a baby and be back up to date for the start of 2009.

When we received the payment from the government, we rang Ibercaja to organise payment, only to be told that the loan was with their legal department and there was nothing that could be done. We were told we´d have to pay the entire outstanding amount (6000€ approx) plus about 2000€ legal fees or they´d start proceedings to take away our house! We asked why they hadn´t sent us any notification that they were referring the loan to their legal department and they told us that they had. It seems they sent a burofax to my wife´s parent´s house in Zaragoza by mistake, incredibly it was sent the same day my wife was in Guadalajara hospital giving birth to our 3rd son. What´s more, her parents were staying at our house for the month to help with our other kids, so no-one was even aware a burofax had been sent.

We spoke to a lawyer friend of ours who told us the best thing to do would be to keep making the loan repayments, get back up to date, because these things take years to go through the courts. So that´s exactly what we´ve done for the past 18 months, and by about September last year we had in fact paid off more of the loan than if we had stuck to the original payment plan.

Then towards the end of last year, a letter arrived at the school where my wife teaches. But not with her name on the envelope, just the name of the school. The letter was opened by the director of the school and was from the court, advising my wife that Ibercaja had applied to put an embargo on her wages, and deduct monies at source. So now my wife´s employer knows we have financial troubles, do we not have any right to privacy?

Next, the 100€ a month from Hacienda for our 3rd child vanished. No notification, nothing. After a lot of phoning around it seems the judge also put an embargo on any monies due from Hacienda.

Then towards the end of last year, the Judge started writing letters directly to the school where my wife works, asking for her payment details. The director explained that the school doesn´t pay my wife, it is Comunidad de Madrid that is the "employer". 2 weeks later, he received the same letter again. He replied again "As per my previous correspondence, it is Comunidad de Madrid that you need to contact etc etc etc..." Then last week, the director of the school received a phonecall from the office of the Judge informing him that Ibercaja were now seeking a judgement against the school for being "disobedient" and not providing details of my wife´s salary. Now my wife feels that she is causing problems for the school and she can´t look the director in the eye, its unbelievable.

This morning the director phoned my wife to say he had received a phonecall from Comunidad de Madrid and that the court were deducting 460€ a month from my wife´s salary (plus 100€ a month from Hacienda, so 560€ a month total). 

So it is 18 months now that we have been phoning around, sending faxes, writing emails, doing everything in our power to find a solution to this and now we´re being hit with losing 560€ a month. Thankfully our mortgage repayments have gone down quite significantly as interest rates dropped, but even so, we´re not sure we´ll be able to survive. As things are it only takes the washing machine breaking, or the car needing repairs to leave us struggling for 2 or 3 months.

What particularly riles me about all this, is that had the burofax been sent to the correct address, all of this would have been avoided. We now have to pay 2300€ in legal fees (50% of the outstanding loan amount) to a legal firm that can´t even send a burofax to the right place.

Had my wife murdered someone, she would have had the opportunity to put her side of the story forward. But it seems that if you are struggling financially during a world banking crisis, an entire legal proceeding can go on without your knowledge. My wife is now blacklisted, 560€ a month worse off, and we now face the very real prospect of struggling with our mortgage.

Obviously I´m aware that there are literally millions of families with far worse troubles than ours, facing repossesion, jobless etc, and we´re not disputing the fact that we owe Ibercaja money, we´re only too happy to pay it in fact. But we would very much like some common sense to be applied to the case, and at the very least be able to put forward our side of the story.

Is there any Spanish or EU law that anyone is aware of that has been breached here? It seems so draconian to me.

Sorry for rambling, I needed to get it off my chest!

so sorry to hear of your unbelievable problems, its  enough to make you want to scream.

just a thought, would it not be a good idea to use your solicitor friend on headed paper write to all concerned with your side of the story, with evidence of wife giving birth etc etc etc.

yoursalan

 Hi Alan,

The lawyer friend is employed by the company that owns the school that my wife works for. The owner has a newspaper, an IT company, a school - fingers in many pies. She doesn´t specialise in financial law at all actually, she was merely doing us a favour. What she did do though, was write a burofax on our behalf, sent to Ibercaja and with a copy sent to the judge with our offer of a payment plan and our willingness to talk to them. They never bothered replying.

I´ll be honest, I think we could just about scrape through paying 560€ a month, but it really doesn´t leave much room for manoeuvre if there is even the smallest crisis. I also object to these legal fees - how have they been calculated? How do we know that someone from Ibercaja, the judge and the solicitor haven´t sat round a pub table and said "I tell you what Juan, you send the burofax to the wrong address, Judge you ignore all pleas for a hearing, and the 3 of us will divvy up the proceeds later" They´re all based in the same town. What´s more the director of the school told us that she will be losing 560€ a month for 22 months - that´s basically the entire loan plus 2300€ legal fees, as if none of the 5000€ we´ve already paid off has been taken into account.

We´ve looked at all sorts of solutions, but most "unscrupulous lenders" want us to re-mortgage our house, but for the sums of money involved it just doesn´t make sense to us. We brought it on ourselves I suppose, but I just have this overwhelming sense that the punishment in no way fits the crime. We´ve lived in our house 5 years, we´re easily contactable, no-one has made the slightest effort to get hold of us about all this. It really is infuriating, time-consuming and utterly daft.

I appreciate your thoughts though Alan, and we´ve seriously considered trying to get some legal representation. But a friend of ours took GasNatural to court for some cowboy installation they did in his apartment. They lost the case, appealed, lost again and they will spend the next 15 years paying off their legal costs and Gas Natural´s. Desperate stuff.