Dog days waiting for stray payment
LITIGATION lawyer Natalia Chumak would have been grateful for a system allowing her to pay a cheque into her bank via a photo on a mobile. Instead she has been locked in battle with Barclays after paying in a cheque in person.
The bank has lost a cheque worth £6,500 – vital funds to be paid to a UK-based charity she set up. The charity Lapa, which means ‘paw’ in Russian, aims to help stray cats and dogs in Russia. One of its recent projects was to relocate stray dogs in Sochi, where many were being culled in a pestcontrol exercise during the Winter Olympics in February.
With financial help from US-based charity the ARNI Foundation, it rescued and rehomed 18 dogs with Lapa sorting logistics. ARNI sent a cheque, which Natalia, 38, paid in to her account at the London Fleet Street branch and was handed a receipt.
Warned that foreign cheques could take six weeks to clear she covered costs using her own money in the meantime.
‘The dogs couldn’t wait,’ says Natalia. ‘It was costing money to keep them in Sochi and every day the puppies were growing, which meant the logistics of how to transport them to the US were changing.’
By the end of May the money had still not arrived. Barclays told Natalia it was likely to be in the clearing process still. By July it became clear that this wasn’t the case.
Natalia was left to chase the bank, finally discovering the cheque had mistakenly been sent to its Fenchurch Street branch, where it had been lost.
She says: ‘The burden is on the customer to check a process that should be monitored by the bank.
‘Barclays had no idea it had lost the cheque until I raised the issue. This cannot be right.’
Barclays has applied a 90-day credit to the account, and has asked Natalia to cancel the original cheque and request a replacement. But she rejects its suggestion.
She says: ‘A major UK bank is putting the responsibility back on to us and assumes the charity will reissue a cheque.
‘ARNI will probably think that this is a shambles and perhaps even dodgy.’
Natalia is now considering taking the bank to the Financial Ombudsman Service.