The eighth section of the Provincial Court of Alicante has annulled the clause of the mortgage hired by a married couple from Alicante who forced them to take out life insurance single premium of more than 4.600 euros to get your mortgage. A practice that the court has considered abusive in this case, since it estimates that not enough information provided to those affected by the product or its cost -since the premium was included directly in the borrowed capital- and there is no evidence that the policy was a request from the contracting parties, for which reason it considers it a bank deposit.
In this way, the Court ratifies the judgment of the Court of First Instance number 5 bis of Alicante and dismisses the appeal filed by the condemned entity, Banco Santander, which has already announced that it will not appeal this decision.
Specifically, the ruling obliges the bank to return to the couple the premium of 4,640.23 euros, less the amounts of the installments already consumed, that is, the amount corresponding to the years in which the insurance has been valid, officially called “credit amortization in case of death”. In addition, you must also return interest that the couple has had to pay for this money over time, since what was done was to include this amount in the amount of the mortgage to finance it, so that instead of the 69,000 euros that he needed, he was granted 73,600 euros, of which the money from the policy was immediately transferred to the insurer, according to the lawyer from Unive Abogados who has handled the case, Sandra Nesteckyte.
In this sense, the judgment itself indicates that the clause in question, “as it does not explain more than the order of immediate transfer charged to the account in which the amount of the loan is paid to the borrower, violates transparency requirements“since” actually conceals that this important premium is financed with the amount of the loanundoubtedly increasing its cost”.
In addition, it states that “it has not been proven that the lender was provided with more pre-contractual information on said premium and insurance” and that, “to the extent that it has not been proved that the contracting of the insurance obeys a request from the lender, it must be considered that we are faced with a consumer tax case of an unsolicited complementary service, assumption of abusiveness contemplated in art. 89.4 of the TRLGDCU (Consolidated Text of the General Law for the defense of consumers and users)”.
The consequence was that “the borrower did not know the real economic burden that the contract entailed,” the court concludes.
As the representative of Unive Abogados points out, this type of single-premium insurance was common practice of some entities, which “imposed it as a condition to grant the loan”, without providing the necessary information or the real cost that it would entail. In this sense, banks used to point out to their clients that it would not entail any effort for them to be included in the capital of the loan, when in reality this means that those affected will see an increase in the interest they pay throughout the life of the loan. mortgage as it is of a higher amount. “In this case, the premium was 4,640 euros, but we have others with much higher amountsof 10,000 and up to 15,000 euros, since the policy depended on the amount of the loan and the personal circumstances of the contracting party”, notes Nesteckyte.
In this sense, there are already several courts throughout Spain that are annulling these clauses that required taking out insurance with the mortgage, which is encouraging a greater number of consumers to claim in court. Consulted by this newspaper, from Santander they assure that they will not appeal the decision of the Provincial Court.
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