The acting Ombudsman of Spain, Francisco Fernández Marugán, asked the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation to study the possibility of establishing an extrajudicial system for those who were affected by the Mortgage Loan Reference Rate (IRPH).
The recent judgment of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that this rate is liable to be considered abusive and therefore annulled by national judges. Thus, the Institution believes that an out-of-court solution would prevent many affected people from going to court for the reimbursement of the quantity paid and to replace the previous rate with a more favorable one.
Therefore, the Ombudsman considers that an extra-judicial mechanism could avoid, on the one hand, the collapse of the courts of justice in the face of the foreseeable wave of complaints and, on the other hand, also benefit those citizens who cannot afford to go to court to claim the cancelation of personal income tax.
According to the Institution’s explanation in a letter sent to the Secretary of State for Economy and Business Support as part of an ex officio action, despite the fact that there is no official data on mortgage loans linked to the IRPH, the number of people affected could be around one million, according to various sources.
Recommendation rejected in 2017
This is not the first time that the Ombudsman has approached the Administration about the problems generated by the IRPH.
In October 2017, he recommended the Government to eliminate the IRPH as the official benchmark for interest rates agreed in the framework of mortgage loans for social housing (see the reccomendation in spanish).
The Institution, which has received more than 200 complaints from those affected by the IRPH, then proposed that this rate be replaced by the Euribor or another official rate, to correct the effects of potentially abusive terms.
This recommendation was rejected. However, the Ombudsman has now reiterated it to the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agency.
