Eight years after the great avalanche of issues related to the floor clauses that flooded the courts, cases related to this matter still occupy a large part of the judicial shelves. Said clauses were incorporated into the mortgage loans without the ability for the client to negotiate the same and on many occasions without the client knowing the consequences of said imposition. Thus, it was the case that while the Euribor collapsed, mortgages with land did not suffer and, therefore, the client continued to pay the same without benefiting from the fall in the interest rate. All of this was redirected thanks to the pro-guarantee character with the consumer of the European Justice, which declared said clauses void, and this made the Supreme Court have to apply said jurisprudence. They were void and abusive due to the lack of transparency on the part of the bank when reporting.
This avalanche of judicial matters resulted in the creation by the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) of specialized courts in mortgage matters. Thus, in June 2017, the Court of First Instance 7 bis originated in Pamplona, which until July 2021 has been in charge of hearing more than 8,000 cases of this type. The number of resolutions issued by said court exceeds 6,800, but as the president of the TSJN, Joaquín Galve, warned last Friday at the opening ceremony of the judicial year, “said good trend is now in danger. As of today the The filing of cases in 2021 (1,402 in the first two quarters) exceeds by 50% those received in the entire year 2020. The situation continues to be worrying. Said court is served by a titular magistrate (Rafael Ruiz de la Cuesta) and It has a reinforcement of a substitute judge and a Territorial Assignment Judge who this month ceases in this task as her intervention in the Commercial Court has been considered more necessary, “said Galve.
Precisely the head of the court, Rafael Ruiz de la Cuesta, warns that “right now we have about 1,300 cases in process”, which translates into work for more than a year, “and it is logical to think that with one less judge we will not to be able to dictate 2,000 sentences as we are going to do this year 2021. This is a court for three judges due to the amount of work that comes in. ” To this must be added, as Galve stressed last Friday, that the Third Section of the Provincial Court of Navarra, that is, the one in charge of seeing the resources of the cases sentenced in the first instance, accumulates 1,800 pending cases and half of them are related to floor clauses. A thousand cases in the Hearing and 1,300 in the court add up to the 2,300 pending cases.
Now, these clauses have already had a mostly peaceful resolution and hardly any issues with just these issues come to court. But the courts have had to face other lawsuits from consumers. Thus, another front that is about to be liquidated are also the clients of banking entities that judicially challenged the agreements that said financial companies offered them so that the land would disappear from their mortgages. And, now, to this day, the role that enters is mainly related to the expenses associated with mortgage loans, that is, the expenses of the notary’s office, the appraisal, the registry and the agency.
WILL THESE SPECIALIZED COURTS CONTINUE?
These are procedures in which an amount of around 1,000 euros on average is at stake for each case and most cases of this type end in a prior hearing. After about six months. In the event that they have a greater evidentiary difficulty, that it is required to make a statement, study a documentary evidence and that a trial is held, the citizen will take a year between filing the claim and obtaining an answer in the form of a sentence. The terms will also be lengthened as is logical due to the loss of one of the three judges. In addition, this specialized court has for the moment certainty to continue until December 2021. But, from then on, the General Council of the Judicial Power, as it has previously decided in other courts of this type of smaller judicial parties, could amortize it and that it ceases to exist. In this case, the mortgage and ground clause matter would be dispersed among the courts of First Instance throughout Navarra. This would also cause the criteria now established in the specialized judicial body to be dispersed and, in this way, citizens could receive responses with disparate criteria for the same issues.
THE EVOLUTION
First semester of 2021 in the specialized court of land clauses of Navarra (First Instance 7 bis of Pamplona). It was created in the summer of 2017 to address this matter.
– 1,402 cases entered (32% more than in 2019 and 311% more than in 2020, the year of the pandemic)
– 1,545 issues resolved
– 1,150 cases in process (in September there are already 1,300 and in the Third Section of the Hearing there are still another 1,000 pending to resolve the appeals).
First semester of 2020.
– 398 cases entered
– 746 issues resolved
– 1,739 pending cases
First semester of 2019.
– 1,057 cases entered
– 731 issues resolved
– 2,487 cases in process
First semester of 2018.
– 1,143 cases entered
– 709 issues resolved
– 2,230 pending cases
– .
