BGH judgment
Negative interest rates were ineffective – many savers can now reclaim money
Hundreds of banks once demanded penalty interest from their customers, now the BGH has declared them ineffective. Is the financial institutions now threatening a huge wave of lawsuits?
Currently minus interest is no longer an issue, but it was less than three years ago that the banking world looked different. According to Verivox, at least 455 financial institutions requested a so -called “banned party” from private customers in 2022. The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has now declared these penalty interest in the largely inadmissible.
According to the judgment of the BGH judges, negative interest rates on savings and overnight money are ineffective. The purpose of savings deposits is to build up the assets of the savers in the medium to long term and to protect them from inflation by interest, said presiding judge Jürgen Ellenberger in the trial in Karlsruhe. If savings would be less due to negative interest rates, it is “diametrically opposed to the purpose of the contract,” said Ellenberger. The court thus largely followed the view of the complaining consumer advice centers.
The BGH judges made a restriction on checking accounts for negative interest rates. Here the BGH Senate responsible for banking law decided that negative interest rates were in principle permitted, but the clauses were too vague and non-transparent. Customers could not have recognized when they were affected by negative interest rates on their current accounts. That is why they were also declared ineffective.
Can savers return negative interest rates?
The exciting question now is whether savers can reclaim the wrongly paid interest. This was not decided by the BGH because the bank customers concerned first have to sue for repayment themselves. The BGH judgment provides you with a promising legal basis.
Questions of the statute of limitations would also have to be taken into account. The limitation period is three years, whereby it is controversial among lawyers whether the deadline began to run with negative interest rates or only now with the judgment of the BGH. Even in the less favorable case, savers could still reclaim money from 2022 – otherwise even further back.
How many customers will actually act against their bank will also depend on how much money it is for them in the specific case. Many banks had requested penalty interest rates of 0.5 percent, but some more. In addition, the negative interest rates were often only applied to new customers or only from a certain amount.
According to a current survey of the Verivox comparison portal, every eighth customer had to pay negative interest rates to his bank before the interest rate turn. In the survey carried out before the Karlsruhe judgment, 88 percent of those surveyed stated that they would reclaim the penalty interest paid in the event of a corresponding judge’s decision.
Specifically, the BGH decided in the procedure on clauses of Sparda-Bank, Commerzbank, a Sparkasse and a Volksbank. Between 2020 and 2021, the institutes usually asked for negative interest rates for new contracts. The allowance ranged from 5000 euros to 250,000 euros. The amount of the negative interest rate was usually 0.5 percent per year.
With material from Reuters and dpa
Source: Stern
