You have no claim to take part of my £3,700 PPI refund
Mrs K.A. writes: Last September, I received a letter from Halifax Bank of Scotland, saying I may be due a payment protection insurance refund following a new legal ruling. I applied online and ten weeks later I received a cheque. Now though, I have received a letter from a claims management company asking for a percentage fee due to its successful claim on my behalf. I had in fact made an unsuccessful claim through them some years ago and was astonished to find that the bank had told them about my own recent claim. IN 2014, you used Claims Advisory Group Limited, a payment protection insurance reclaim firm based in Manchester, to try to recover premiums you paid to HBOS. It then submitted a claim on your behalf which the bank quickly rejected. That was that – until recently.
Last August, a court ruling came into effect after a borrower named Susan Plevin successfully claimed she had been treated unfairly because a lender failed to tell her a huge chunk of her PPI premium was the salesman’s commission.
Banks were forced to contact anyone who had been sold PPI but were not warned that 50 per cent or more of their premium would go in commission. So, HBOS quite rightly contacted you, invited you to claim, and then paid you a total refund of £3,706. The shock came when Claims Advisory Group sent you a demand for 39 per cent of this as its fee. It told you: ‘You will see from our terms that we state our fee covers any compensation payments made to you in relation to PPI policies, of which we can prove a direct link between our original letter of complaint sent and the offer you received.’
But there was no such link. It failed with its complaint, yet it expected to be paid simply because someone else succeeded, paving the way for you to file a fresh claim by yourself. I had a word with HBOS and it told me the claims company’s details should have been deleted from its records when the original claim was turned down. Instead, it mistakenly notified Claims Advisory Group about your refund.
HBOS has now contacted the Manchester claims firm which has agreed to withdraw its demand.
The bank told me: ‘We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience Mrs A has experienced as a result of this error.’ HBOS has also sent you £50 by way of an apology.
I did invite claims company boss Jamie Alaise to comment. I also asked whether his company is still in dispute with the taxman over £7.6million it is said to owe in VAT. He offered no comment on the demand you received or on his company’s VAT bill.