How do I know if my floor clause is abusive?
What? Not all floor clauses are abusive? That’s right. One thing is that these clauses exist in your mortgage contract and other is they are abusive or not. It is a determining factor, because if these clauses are not considered abusive, you can’t do anything about it. So, how do I know if my floor clauses is abusive? Coming next, all the information you need to know.
How do I know if my floor clause is abusive?
These clauses are not illegal in principle. To be illegal, they must first be abusive, which will result in the nullity of these clauses. To be it they have to breach the main requirement determined by the judgment of the Supreme Court in may 2013:
- Transparency: If the bank before the signing of the mortgage contract has not informed you about the floor clauses and neither explained you the consequences of it, that means that this clause is not transparent.
- In addition, if the grammatical structure used by the bank is not sufficiently simple and understandable as to make you understand it, it would also breach this requirement. The bank has the obligation to give you the binding offer, in other words, a document that briefly informed you about the conditions for lending. If it was not given to you, is a way of demonstrating that you were not informed about these clauses. Although you were given this document, you can continue to make a claim if this document does not comply with the transparency requirement established by the Supreme Court.
If the bank has not complied with these requirements, your clause is abusive and you will be able to claim all the goverpaid money since the existence of these ones in your mortgage contract.
“To check if your clause is ilegal, you will need a lawyer. Choose the one who best suits your needs from our directory of lawyers”.
Obstacles to claim
Once the question “how do I know if my floor clause is ilegal” has been responded, here there are some obstacles you maybe have to face:
- if your bank interprets that there is no lack of transparency in the floor clause of your mortgage contract, you must go to court and a judge will determine the transparency of that clause. If he declares it as non-transparent, the clause will be null, and in that case, you can start the claim to the bank.
- If you have already started a process referred to this issue against the bank and have received compensation from this before 2013, you can not make a claim, because according to the Supreme Court, it’s already and adjudicated matter. If your case has been judicially closed before the judgment of the European Court of Justice in December 2016, you will not be able to make a claim.
- If you have come to an agreement with the bank, you will also have it complicated. These agreements basically eliminate the floor clause to change to a fixed-rate mortgage contract, which translates into a reduction in the monthly payment. However, this reduction cannot be compared with the total return of the money paid for the floor clause. With these agreements there is included a clause in which you had to commit to not claim anything more to the bank or to go to court, and you also had to say that you understood their effects. The doctrine of the Supreme in this area holds, when there is a warning highlighted in a contract, as in this case, “customer can not argue in court that was not warned”. So any action against the bank will be complicated.
Act now
If your floor clause is illegal, we invite you from legalbono to make the claim required that you have to bring to the bank. Is not complicated and will not take you a lot of time. Oh! It is also free.
