A NatWest customer has lost his legal bid to attain damages for what he calls “unfair” banking penalty charges.<\/p>\n
Barrister Tom Brennan took the high street bank to court after he was charged \u00c2\u00a32,500 for unauthorised overdrafts whilst he was a law student.<\/p>\n
NatWest offered to settle out of court for around \u00c2\u00a33,000 but Mr Brennan pursued his claim for damages, arguing the bank acted unlawfully in taking his money.<\/p>\n
The City of London County Court has now dismissed his case, describing it as contrived.<\/p>\n
Judge Peter Simpson said: “There is no prospect of success and no other reasons why this should go to trial, in my judgement.”<\/p>\n
Mr Brennan said he was not surprised by the verdict and would appeal it in the High Court.<\/p>\n
He accused the banks of attempting to avoid court adjudication by “forcing” money into people’s accounts.<\/p>\n
“It seems any financial institutions can force money into an individual’s account and therefore excuse themselves from any court case,” he said.<\/p>\n
Martin Lewis, of consumer website MoneySavingExpert.com, who has been leading a campaign against penalty charges, said the outcome was unlikely to influence a test case to be heard by the High Court.<\/p>\n
“Tom Brennan has always been going for the extreme case that is totally different from what everyone else is going for. It is something I always questioned the wisdom of,” he said.<\/p>\n
NatWest will not seek costs from Mr Brennan over the court case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A NatWest customer has lost his legal bid to attain damages for what he calls “unfair” banking penalty charges. Barrister<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banking","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}