Advice please regarding a past (minor) charges refund

[wnettie]

Hello everyone,

 

I’ve been a member of this fantastic forum for a couple of days now and am now getting myself ready to submit the Preliminary letter to the (highly incompetent) Cooperative Bank (luckily, I have got all my past statements and so did not have to do an SAR).

 

However, there is one little question which I would really appreciate your knowledgeable input for, since I’m not sure how best to handle this.

 

The story started back in April ’05 when I ordered an international bank transfer for some 900 EUROS to be sent to my father in Germany. However, what the bank did, was in fact transfer the requested amount in GB POUNDS (which would equate some 1350 Euros). Also, despite the fact that my father immediately notified me of the difference, it took over 3 weeks for the difference to be credited to my account again (obviously, I did not want my father to have to incur any transfer charges due to the incompetence of my bank). This caused some problems both with cashflow and charges as you can imagine, and the bank refunded £70 to my account in early July (!) – but obviously only after I complained.

 

Anyone who knows Coop statements knows that any commission/unpaid charges descriptions are totally vague regarding what they relate to, and admittedly, I do not keep the letters which have details of what each charge relates to.

My question now is as to how I should deal with this refund in my Schedule of Charges: Do I include it as a refund (and a minus amount), or do I just find ignore/delete those charges from the Schedule, which the refund might relate to (though there would be some guesswork involved).

 

 

I have another question which relates to the interest that I might reclaim. As I understand, I can only reclaim interest, which is on an overdraft directly caused by the charges. I am only reclaiming a fairly small portion of the interest charges, since my overdraft periods, in the main, were caused by my own transactions rather than the directly by bank charges (and the Coop, in true ethical spirit, only started charging me significant sums when I really couldn't afford it after having had a baby!).

 

 

However, with the above described messed-up international transfer, the interest charged on at least one occasion was not directly caused by charges but by the fact that the bank made a mistake in the performing the transfer. Would it be wise to make reference, in the schedule, to the bank’s incompetence being the direct cause of the charge, or should I just include it without any comment?

 

Any comments/advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

Many thanks in advance!

 

WNettie