I am in dispute with my former bank. They have claimed to court that they gave me an overdraft extension on 02/01/09 which they simply didn't do. Their own final response confirms this but they continue to claim it. I want to make a request for disclosure and challenge them to provide the documents which would prove their claim of an alleged extension. Can anyone advise on what permanent records a bank will keep of overdrafts so that I can ask for exactly the right thing, and so when they are unable to produce it, I will be in a position to show that it didn't exist in the first place? If it helps, my bank was Lloyds TSB and it was a business account. Any advice would be really appreciated. Thank you.

Yes - it is a huge, messy fight that I've fought for years and if anyone needs to know any details at all please just ask. What I've tried to do is shrink it all down to the smallest thing possible to make it appropriate for this forum and also to retain focus - so I chose this - the bank handed my personal guarantee over to collections witthout giving me a chance to discuss it. i complained. They told me I hadn't contacted them. I sent them an email proving otherwise. They ignored it. I sent it many times and referred to it many more. They haven't mentioned it once. If I can stay on that then I have faith that this is the tip of the iceberg and the rest of Lloyds' lies will unravel in time. Thanks IMS for moral support and thanks in advance to any other comments in the days to come! Cheers

Thank you so much for your response – if nothing else it is giving me a sliver of hope Yes, I’ll definitely write to the Chief Executive. I should tell you what else I’ve done – originally the dispute was a business one but is now personal as it was reduced to being about the calling up of my personal guarantee. As a business dispute we sent in a folder of evidence to the Ombudsman which was ignored. This included a report by Lloyds which ranged from them retrospectively justifying problematic dates by alleging we had arranged an overdraft limit of thousands of pounds for eight days – to them changing dates and limits on the say-so of non-account holders to a whole heap of other things which I am too tired to go into now. The dispute was handled by a David Martin who was a disgrace. He sent us a stock response that evidence we sent had been looked at already. He had not uttered a single word on at least ten vital points that had been accompanied with proof. Lloyds refused to look at things because they said it was for the Ombudsman, the Ombudman refused with the stock response that they’d looked at it and when we sent in a folder of evidence and pointed out that not one single word had been uttered on anything in it, they merely sent us the exact same response and treated us like vexatious customers. I managed to get the single issue of the personal guarantee kept alive by pointing out it was a personal banking matter after the business one had been swept under the carpet. I wrote to my MP Hilary Benn who did pass my grievance onto the current Chief Executive of Lloyds. The Chief Executive simply passed it to complaints who, instead of investigating, simply wrote a brief letter to Mr. Benn saying that my "recent correspondence to you does not relate to a product or service we’ve provided him" Mr. Benn accepted this without question and passed it on to me despite the fact that I had sent in seven pages of detailed notes of specific poor service. And now Lloyds have given my complaints to a Bethan Hansen. Now Bethan Hansen has dismissed my case without actually acknowledging any of the evidence I sent, including the infamous email I posted about. Not only is Ms. Hansen one of the people about whom I originally complained and is now adjudicating on herself, she also belongs to the Recovery department not Complaints Anyway – I will try the new Chief Executive and will handle the letter as you suggested. I realise I have made a series of sweeping statements without proof but I am conscious of not overwriting on a post – however – I would be more than happy to go into as much detail as anyone wants about any single thing I have mentioned. I will also make sure I write whilst calm (!) and make any report as clear as I can. In the meantime, if anyone has a totally left-field suggestion that might get my case looked at properly I’d be grateful. Maybe an open letter to lloyds? Where would the best place to post that be? A mix of fact and an description of the emotional implications involved in having to fight this case? For now thanks - this is the one place where I've felt listened to - and let’s see what the new Chief Exec can do!

I am returning to this post because the last few months have been incredibly frustrating. I have been sending Lloyds incontrovertible proof of my case and they have been ignoring it to the point where I think I'm going slightly mad I want to highlight just one example - there are many, many others. I'd really appreciate any feedback. Ok - one complaint is that Lloyds passed over my account to Collections without giving me a chance to meet my manager and discuss my account and grievances first. Lloyds' position is that they were trying to contact me and couldn't and that I never contacted them. This is rubbish and I provided them with several pieces of black and white proof that this was not true. One example was an email I wrote to my manager, Ben Kimball, on 21/02/09 in which I said: “This is just a quick heads up to let you know that Tracie will give you a ring again on Monday. If we do not hear back from you could you email us a suggested date for us to meet? After half past three on any week day would be fine, for example.” I think the email clearly shows that: · First the date – 21/02/09 is well before the Formal Demand of payment of 12/03/09. · Second it refers to Tracie phoning ‘again’ which is evidence that we were trying to contact Mr. Kimball even before the 21/02/09. · Third it shows I am contacting him to give him notice of a call rather than trying on spec. This shows we were making a real effort to make contact and not a token one. · Fourth ‘if we do not hear back from you’ hopefully gives a sense that we were already having difficulty getting him to reply. · Fifth ‘could you email us a suggested date for us to meet?’ This shows that even though I was having difficulty getting hold of him I tried to set in place a ‘Plan B’ where he could be guaranteed to get information across to me. · Sixth to further help him I suggest dates. · Seventh these dates are not obscure ones – I will be available at times covering every day of the week! In a nutshell – I had been trying hard to get hold of our bank manager. Mr. Kimball never replied. I have tried desperately to get Lloyds to acknowledge all this: · On 21/02/09 I sent them a copy of the email · On 05/05/09 I wrote to Lloyds enclosing my email correspondence. · On 27/07/09 I again enclosed the email to Lloyds · In a letter of 06/09/10 I refer to the emails specifically · On 03/11/10 I refer to the email again · On 01/12/10 I refer to the email again! · On 22/02/11 I quote clearly from the email and complain that no one has acknowledged it. · On 05/04/11 I specifically ask them to comment on the issues they’ve ignored (including the email.) · I have since complained in writing about the refusal to acknowledge the email two more times And yet Lloyds simply do not mention it – it has disappeared from history and yet their file on me is full of copies of it. And their position remains that I never tried to contact them. Now, any practical advice would be welcomed - however apart from anything else, any assurances that I’m not going mad and that my email does show what I claim it does would probably help my morale/state of mind considerably! Don't know if IMS is still around for kind words, but I'll take anything right now! Thanks

Thanks so much for this, it's appreciated. I think it backs up my gut feeling but I'll go through the Banking Code as you suggested to find out more. I've kept the main complaints (ie our original dispute) separate so as not to confuse the issues. Right now, I'm trying to pick individual points on which to fight and I'd love to be able to say that whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, Lloyds went about things improperly, and hopefully our arguments will accumulate. You mentioned complaining direct to Lloyds - everything to do with that account goes to a Glen Davies and he is the one who insistes we did not contact the bank before it was passed over. He is the one to whom we keep sending the email and he is the one who somehow managed to 'misdate' the letter we sent. Absolute proof in black and white just being ignored again and again until we're dizzy with frustration! Anyway - if they're trying so hard to avoid admitting this then yes, perhaps they know they've done something wrong. Okay - thanks for your feedback!!

We feel absolutely let down and ripped off by our bank for a lot of reasons that I won’t go into for fear of ranting! I wanted to ask for opinions on one relatively small aspect of the aftermath of it all – We were sent a letter of concern and immediately made strenuous efforts to meet with our bank manager to discuss our account with him. He mysteriously became incommunicado at a critical time (as he had often done in the past) and would not return any emails, letters or phone calls. They then started chasing for arrears. Leaving aside our main grievances – did the bank behave properly by passing our account over to Collections without first giving us a chance to discuss things with our manager? Incidentally, we did complain about this. I sent Lloyds a copy of an email I’d sent at the time asking our manager to contact us and suggesting times to meet and referring to phone calls we’d made in the weeks before. It was proof in black and white that we’d been proactive and the bank dealt with it by ignoring it! We sent it to them eight times! We also gave them a copy of a letter we’d sent recorded delivery to show how hard we had been trying to talk to people. The bank responded by ‘mixing’ up the dates of the letter with another one we had sent months later after the account had been given to Collections. As they were going on recorded delivery notices attached to the letters I’m not sure how they did this accidentally. Anyway, I digress...... Should the bank have passed our account over without giving us the opportunity to discuss it first? Any feedback would be really appreciated. Thanks!

Hi - I bought a flat - one in a block of around forty fairly average ones - in Leeds. I and many other residents feel that our Property Management agency are ripping us off on a number of counts and we are researching this matter. Whilst researching we found that we are paying six and a half grand a year for Management Fees (to people who really aren't doing anything) and 4 grand a year as a Head Landlord Service Charge. Considering both amounts are going to the same company we feel a little resentful. Can anyone shed light on why two payments are necessary and if they seem reasonable? Thanks!

Sorry for the length of this post: We had a business loan with an overdraft. Our overdraft limit seemed to be changed almost arbitrarily by our manager who combined this with being incommunicado for days at critical times. Just when we began to think this might be deliberate and that the situation had become intolerable he was replaced. In contrast, the first meeting with our new manager went so well we asked to aim for a £25,000 overdraft limit to help us move the business up a level. There would be a £20,000 interim limit and proof our prospects justified an increased limit and another meeting to discuss all this before the £25,000 could be put in place with my house as security. The day after we agreed this our overdraft disappeared completely! We had had no notice and we were days before an important job. Our new manager also disappeared that week (for the entire week, again with no notice) with no one who could act on his behalf. The two weeks that followed were a nightmare where we had to abandon many jobs due to uncertainty and also where numerous promises by the bank were broken. The interim limit also failed to materialise until the following month – this despite being told it would be in place ‘tomorrow’ on several occasions. We were only just ready for our jobs and had been so close to disaster that we felt moving up to £25,000, putting up my house for security and relying of Lloyds to do the right thing seemed like suicide. Consequently, we asked to stay on the current level which seemed financially responsible. Only then were we told that by accepting the £20,000 limit Lloyds considered us ‘locked into’ the £25,000. Things got even scarier – our overdraft was taken away and despite chasing for a meeting to discuss options our manager once again became incommunicado and passed our debt over. We complained to the Ombudsman who found Lloyds’ service poor. However, we had wanted an acknowledgement of just how disastrous and possibly dishonest it had been. We had been angry and so perhaps our case with the Ombudsman had been too emotive and on too large a scale and so we started to send concrete evidence in concerning smaller points. Unfortunately, the Ombudsman had reached a point psychologically where they felt they had looked at everything and so all our new evidence was ignored, which was absolutely gutting. We decided to open a new case to remedy this – however, the Ombudsman decided that as the new case was again ultimately about Lloyds’ behaviour it was too similar to the original case and so would not be looked at. And yet – submitting our new evidence as part of the original claim meant it was lost as the Ombudsman was refusing to look at anything else. And when we went direct to Lloyds with the new evidence they simply told us to give it to the Ombudsman! We therefore have a large pile of really concrete evidence against Lloyds with no one who will look at it and Lloyds probably chasing for money any day now. We have proof that Lloyds had different overdraft limits at the same time, proof of totally random overdraft limits that were never discussed by any of us, proof that we were in different parts of the country when meetings were supposed to have happened, proof that our manager changed our overdraft limit on the say so of a non-account holder, we have a personal guarantee with no independent witness, we have proof of Lloyds claiming we arranged a large increase in our overdraft for EIGHT days! The list goes on.... I would welcome any advice as to what options are open to me. Also – I really want to stress that our company was a good one with enough jobs lined up to make 2009 our best year yet. No one was owed a penny save the bank with whom we are in dispute. All our clients would have worked with us again in a shot. I realise this post makes Lloyds look unrealistically demonic and so people may wish to ask for more detail to try and get a bit of balance to the story – please ask anything. Any feedback at all would be really appreciated as this is obviously casting a shadow over life right now. Many thanks.

I would really appreciate your thoughts on this - I followed the advice from previous posts and wrote a letter requesting my credit agreement and enclosing a pound payment as I have been advised to do. Apex did two things which have really upset me: The first is that they wrote: "I can confirm that this request needs to be made direct to the Royal Bank of Scotland as they are the principle company with whom the agreement was made." This goes against everything I have been told. As it is Apex who have bought the debt, surely they are now responsible for provinjg it exists? Can anyone advise on this? But what has really pee'd me off is the fact that they sent back the original letter I had written asking for a copy of my credit agreement. However, they have put a note on it saying 'No fee enclosed' which is complete rubbish. So on top of everything else they've nicked a pound off me! And I don't know what has upset me more, this or the dispute in general! I would love people's feedback/advice on this. Cheers

Thanks for this Tom Tubby, it's excellent advice. Unfortunately for us, my partner was very stressed about someone actually turning up at the door and so paid the guy. It ended up being over £200. One thing that hurts is that they claim they gave written notice to our PREVIOUS address and yet knew exactly where to turn up in person ie they knew our PRESENT address, so surely they should have sent a written notice HERE first? They didn't and so charged us an excessive amount to 'cover' the bailiff turning up in person, which wouldn't have been necessary had they written here. And all this for a ticket she paid a few days late. If anyone has any advice on whether we could or should claim any of this back, I'd be really grateful. I was really annoyed that my girlfriend had paid this amount but didn't really appreciate just how pressured the whole thing was making her feel. If I can get anything back for her I'd love to try.

Thanks people, it is appreciated!

Thanks for this advice. I was hoping (against hope?) that Nat West might have commited some kind of procedural offence by passing my details over without having a contract and so even if they find one later it's too late for them (and Apex). But yes, will write to Apex asking for credit agreement. Thanks.

£55. A bit galling as she has just paid it and we are both feeling a little deflated.

Basically looking for help - I have just had a visit from a bailiff from JWB looking for money for a late payment for my partner's parking ticket. Firstly, we paid it , although it was late. Secondly, we thought we had paid it in full but it turns out that there was an extra charge to pay for being late which we didn't know about. Any letters telling us about this would have been sent to our previous address as my partner updated her address on her passport and driving license but was late doing it on her car tax whic is what they must have looked at. However, while the council may have written to a previous address, JWB certainly have the correct address and have turned up for payment. However, on the letter they have given us it does say that they should have tried to write and phone us before coming and collecting. They haven't. They have simply sent a bailiff round and added around £300 for the pleasure of doing so. Can anyone help? What can we say if he comes around tomorrow? Sorry for any panicked tone however, it is becoming quite stressful. Cheers

I'd really like to know where I stand on the following issue: I had a loan with Nat West. I disputed some of their charges and instead of investigating my case they attempted a whole host of tricks to prevaricate and avoid dealing with this. Consequently I stood my ground. Consequently my charges and arrears accrued. I then asked Nat West for a copy of the credit agreement which they had to admit they could not find. Despite this, they sold my debt over to an agency, Apex, who conducted themselves in a very rude and generally dubious manner. I wrote to them informing them that I knew they had taken on a debt without having the contract and have not heard from them for a few weeks. I am hoping against hope thay by selling my debt over without knowing where the contract was Nat West have forfeited the right to chase for it and by buying the debt without a contract Apex have forfeited the right to chase too. Could anybody advise me on this? Cheers!