Mobilized massively denied credit holidays: experts named the reason

Banks cleverly exploit loopholes in laws

Mobilized bank customers faced massive errors and denials in providing them with legally required credit holidays. Banks admit that there are such problems, but they are sure that there is no violation of the law in this. Lawyers, after analyzing the relevant legal norms, tend to agree with the banks rather than take the side of their clients called to participate in the special operation. Why the mechanism for providing credit holidays to mobilized people needs to be clarified and on whose side the law is now, MK found out from experts.

In the Russian segment of the Internet, the problems of refusing credit holidays for mobilized people are being actively discussed. In one of the social networks, a woman from Novokuibyshevsk complained that her husband was mobilized, and the bank did not give credit holidays for loans issued to him. She was interested in the group of her city, what to do in such cases. Another client of the bank, who bears the name of a well-known businessman, complained that when he applied for a loan vacation on the hotline, he was advised to write to the chat. After he did so, he was already advised in the chat to call the hotline. Another client of a large bank was told that his application for a loan holiday would be considered for a week. When he replied that he was leaving for a military unit in three days and would not be able to receive an answer, as he would be in places with limited communications, his credit organization preferred to keep silent.

A dozen and a half complaints about the provision of credit holidays to mobilized people were recorded on the Banki.ru forum. So, one of the forum visitors tried to get the required benefits in connection with the mobilization of his father for his obligations, but “the bank ignored requests in the chat, and they hung up on the hotline.” The next complaint is related to the service work of the bank. The forum visitor said that despite the formal approval of the loan holiday for the mobilized, no changes have occurred in his personal account – the previous payment schedule has been preserved: “the delay is burning and penalties are dripping”.

Human rights defenders in the field of financial services, to which MK turned, did not receive complaints about the provision of credit holidays to the mobilized. In their opinion, this indicates that against the backdrop of mass approval of credit holidays by banks, the shortcomings are not systematic, but are isolated cases that need to be investigated separately.

Violations are simply consequences of the imperfect operation of the system. And it is difficult to blame banks for this, because they did not have time to develop an approval mechanism in such a way that it would work without failures. “The banks themselves, recognizing the existence of difficulties, attribute them to technical reasons,” says Vladimir Kuznetsov, vice president of the Association of Lawyers for Registration, Liquidation, Bankruptcy and Legal Representation. “We can agree with this, since the credit holidays for the mobilized literally “fell” on the banks, and the technical component of this decision to some extent turned out to be unable to satisfy such a massive request.”

On the other hand, the amendments on credit holidays for the mobilized were prepared in a hurry, the law turned out to be imperfect. Thus, banks may refuse to satisfy applications based on the incompleteness of the data provided by the applicant, doubts about the authenticity of the application package, and other reasons. According to Andrey Kevush, a lawyer at the Unified Protection Center, firstly, closer control over the activities of banks in relation to mobilized persons by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation is necessary. Secondly, the issue of refinancing old loans should be worked out, since people, agreeing to credit holidays, often do not fully understand what legal consequences this can lead to. And these consequences are such that you still have to pay, including interest in full, only later.

Sometimes banks require notarized powers of attorney from those representatives who submit documents on behalf of the mobilized. All this is due to the objective difficulty for those mobilized in the conditions in which they find themselves to collect the necessary package of documents for banks in a timely manner and in full. According to the founder of the vvCube consulting group Vadim Tkachenko, in this regard, the banks themselves should improve the methods of remote submission of such applications by the mobilized, so that this can be done quickly, simply and with fixing the fact of sending the document.