A mountain of evidence against Lloyds being ignored

[noonakai]

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.