High Court showdown for HBOS bank
HBOS now has to justify its action before a High Court judge
The HBOS bank will appear in the High Court next week to justify its refusal to obey 11 court orders to repay bank charges to some of its customers.
The bank is facing a winding-up order obtained by Robertson Holbrook, a claims management company acting on behalf of the 11 customers.
At the last minute, HBOS has obtained an injunction against the order which it says is "ridiculous".
The issue will now be decided in the High Court in Leeds next Friday.
Robertson Holbrook says HBOS - the owner of the Halifax and Bank of Scotland - has persistently failed to obey the county court's decision that it should repay the customers a combined total of £50,000.
"They have done nothing about the eleven judgements against them," said company spokesman Tim Russell.
Ridiculous
A spokesman for HBOS said that the application for a winding-up order had been an abuse of the court process.
"It is ridiculous, we made £6bn last year," he said.
"We have moved to have a stay applied in the light of the OFT case," he explained.
Pointing out that the bank had already paid the claimants £21,000, he said HBOS wanted payment of the rest deferred until the outcome of next year's High Court test case involving the Office of Fair Trading and the banking industry.
This will attempt to settle whether or not hundreds of thousands of bank customers have any legal basis for their argument that they have been improperly charged punitive overdraft fees on their current accounts.
Stays
The High Court test case was announced at the end of July.
Since then, in courts up and down the country, the banks have been allowed to ask individual judges if they would stay, or halt, any current or new cases, until the outcome of the case.
In many areas judges have agreed to this approach.
But HBOS appears to be taking the argument a step further, claiming that a stay should be applied even to cases which it has already lost in a county court.
"We do have the right to have them stayed after the original hearing in the county court, because they were all judgements in default," said the bank's spokesman.
He explained that for various reasons the bank had failed to turn up and argue its case at the original hearings in early August.
Insolvency
Robertson Holbrook accused HBOS of procrastinating to avoid paying up.
"Up until the statutory demand to pay up or be wound up, three weeks, ago they ignored all our correspondence," said Mr Russell.
"We will attempt to have the injunction overturned as they still have not offered to pay up," he added.
Winding up orders are usually pursued, as an alternative to sending in bailiffs, where a company cannot pay its debts because it is insolvent.
In this case there is no doubt that HBOS is solvent and very profitable, but it is still open to anyone who is owed money to threaten to wind up a company anyway under the provisions of the 1986 insolvency act.
Source: bbc.co.uk
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