Families suffer home loans torment that watchdogs failed to stem

The Financial Services Authority fined mortgage company Swift 1st £630,000 earlier this month and ordered it to compensate borrowers with £2 million of refunds. It was the fifth sub-prime lender so far to be fined for the same wrongdoing. The lenders had unfairly charged borrowers who were in arrears, said the watchdog. Although five businesses have been fined, there are others whose practices appear similarly harsh but which have yet to be

One is Acenden, formerly known as Capstone, a mortgage business that adminsters thousands of mortgages originally provided by offshoots of failed US investment bank Lehman Brothers. Financial Mail has highlighted numerous cases where Acenden has applied large, repeated and unexplained charges to borrowers in arrears. In some cases these charges are blamed for the homeowners losing their...Read more on this story HERE