Grandparents house repossessed - any legal minds around please?

[onemorecakeplease]

I'm not even sure that's the right title really

Mid 90s my aunt persuaded my gps to remortgage their house and used the money to pay off an outstanding business loan. Her business was struggling and before the first mortgage payment was due, the business was made bankrupt.

Gps bank knew what the funds were being used for and that neither of them had an income beyond pension.
They were lent £130k in 1993.

The bank allowed my gps to stay in the house until they died and froze the interest I believe.

No payments were ever made to the mortgage by my aunt or gps as nobody could afford to.

I've recently found out about this and am just so surprised the bank would lend money to pay the debts of a clearly failing business (was hundreds of thousands in debt)
And that they would lend the money to my gps who would have not been able to pay it back.

Have I cause to complain and ask the bank to explain where it's duty of care to its customers went that day? And if so, how do I go about it after all this time

I have statements and account numbers etc so that's a good start I suppose.

Thanks for reading - I'll try to answer any qs I can.

GPS were never involved in the business other than this loan.

There is no way on the face of gods green and pleasant land that a bank will have shredded those type of original documents. Especially if they related to a charge on land.

I agree with Bluntness - all banks are specifically set up to deal with mortgage agreements lasting 25 years or even more. They're fallible, yes, but not that rubbish.

The house was used as security against the loan. The loan wasn't repaid, the bank owns the house. The current renewed interest in the loan is due to grandmother's increasing age and everyone totting what she's worth.

What rubbish - OP clearly explained the money, of any goes to her DC.

Older people do tend to worry about what will happen on their death and clearly nobody in this situation has any clue! At least if they ask then grandma can speak to them and let them know the house will be taken by the bank? Saves any future issues (particularly for the aunt who is responsible for this mess)

Mychild yes they would. I actually spoke on behalf of a friend who was up to her neck in debt to a guy in charge of her case and he couldn't see the problem.

I told her to do a SAR for £10 and then wrote back when they failed to produce the original agreement and any paperwork/ statements older than a couple of years that as there was no original agreement then she didn't recognise the debt.

Never heard from them again and 6 years later it dropped off her credit file. Same thing with the remortgage.

You would be surprised how banks acted in the 90s and 00ties.

There is virtually zero chance that the bank has lent this money for 24 years without charging interest or protecting their investment some other way. Interest rates were much higher in 1993 than now. It was not long after that that we got our first mortgage and I can't remember the exact rate but it was about 6-8%.

The loan had to be secured on the house somehow. It would either have been equity release, or could it have been a shared appreciation mortgage?

www.theguardian.com/money/2012/jun/08/shared-appreciation-mortgage-bank-of-scotland

www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-4041516/How-BoS-rushed-borrowers-shared-appreciation-mortgages.html

Either way, the bank could own a very large percentage of this property in either unpaid interest, or as a percentage of the increase in value. . Unfortunately your Grandma needs to write/talk to them to get all the information about the account and it's terms and conditions.

I think now things might be different but going back 10/20 / 30 years it was a different kettle of fish.

I was out in a pub garden on a Sunday many moons ago and got talking to a girl who worked in the mortgage department of my mortgage company. I asked her what was going on and she told me the department was in chaos. Stuff being thrown away no records of anything. If I had known then what I know now I think I would have got away with not paying my mortgage and getting my house for free. I even was given the deeds to my house for safe keeping.

Where are the deeds to the house

Is your Grandma happy and not on the bread line?

They took independent legal advice.

The bank have done nothing wrong.

If you seek to sell the property you'll find they have a charge on the property. You could check with the land registry what the nature of the charge is - that wouldn't cause any problems or alert the bank.

Ultimately you have no restitution. When your grandmother passes the bank will claim back their loan amount plus any interest agreed.

It seems there was no duping as you are trying to make out.

Oliver you are talking shite when it comes to a deal re a house. Absolute nonsense.

Well my shite has saved tens of thousands of pounds.

The bank know she owes the money. They are sending statements.

There is a paper trail.

The op has no case.

How do you I now the have a copy of the signed documents? You don't!

Remember when houses sold like hot cakes and banks couldn't keep up or how banks never had enough staff? Big growth = issues in training and all the new online computer systems etc?

Sorry it's worth asking

Haven't rtft but off the top of my head it sounds like to have any chance of challenging the validity of the loan agreement there would have to be allegations of undue influence by your aunt over your DGM. The problem you will have is that the records of what your DGM was/wasn't advised by her solicitors have likely been destroyed because of the time now elapsed. I'd also query the bank's due diligence process in underwriting a loan to be repaid by people without means to do so. And for the purposes of repaying a debt owed by a business they had no connection to. I'd ask the lender for a copy of their lending policy at the time and their underwriting file.

Having said that, any claim in negligence is probably statute barred due to the 15 year long stop.

The grandmothers solicitor will have a contemporaneous record of what was discussed.

It is much much more likely that the op hasn't been given all the facts and/or has misunderstood some of the information.

Unless that paper trail leads back to them having a signed and dated original agreement then you can have umpteen years of statements but without that one piece of paper which shows exactly the grandparents were signing up to then they are not worth the paper they are written on.

No court will even entertain a case of this nature without a signed original agreement.

Don't forget in 1993 you still had a lot of stuff done by hand and paperwork was archived and things were a complete mess

If this is an equity release then it is quite clear cut if the bank, (not the solicitor, not the gm) has the paperwork but, if a company hasn't come for payment after 6 years and it isn't an equity release then the debt becomes time barred.

Olivers are you a solicitor?

Sorry just realised they are sending yearly statements so forget that last bit

Op. When was the interest frozen and they were given a life interest?

I'd love to know what building society this is. If it were one that I am a shareholder with, the I'd be pretty unhappy at the OPs grandma having lived rent free in a BS asset for 24 years. I'd also be unhappy about Oliversmumsarmy's tactic of wriggling out of a debt that no-one denies is owed.

No just been through this more times than I care to say and realise banks in the time period that is being discussed didnt realise the importance of keeping such records.

You would think that they would realise the significance but they didn't.

Even up to a few years ago when I was talking to one person from a bank about friends credit card bill and he was explaining how she did owe the debt even though they had dumped all paperwork from a couple of years before as they had been sending statements. He did not get that without the original agreement the bank could not take her to court. He insisted they could. But they never did. They couldn't. The original agreement listed the terms and conditions that the money was being lent or what interest rates things would be charged at.

Credit card bill is not the same as a mortgage or charge on property.

If there is a charge on the property (as i suspect) that will be registered