Dear Katie,
When my ex-husband told me that he wanted a divorce, my lawyer advised me to immediately freeze all our joint accounts with Barclays. I did so but Barclays failed to prevent him accessing our joint online accounts not once but several times.
As a result he was able to remove a sum of around £200,000. On the other hand, I was not able to remove any cash from the two accounts because it froze me out instead.
Barclays admitted that it had failed to secure the accounts but refused to compensate me. Instead, it said that it would need to await the outcome of the divorce settlement before it could assess the loss.
When the final hearing of the divorce concluded, Barclays asked to see a copy of the confidential judgment so it could assess the loss. This meant that I had to apply to the court for permission to share the judgment with Barclays. My lawyers sent Barclays the judgment as requested but Barclays refused to re-consider my complaint.
My lawyers then contacted the Financial Ombudsman Service which refused to consider the complaint based on the time that had elapsed between Barclays’ failure to secure my accounts and me contacting the Ombudsman. This seems particularly unfair as the delay was the result of me waiting for the divorce to conclude, exactly as Barclays had requested.
So as things stand, Barclays has admitted its failure but has refused to compensate me for the loss. As a result of its failure, I was left to fight the divorce with no cash, while my ex-husband was able to use the money from our joint accounts as he pleased.
At the very least if Barclays had frozen the joint accounts as requested, I would have received at least half the money. Instead I have received nothing.
Anon
Dear reader,
Ironically when you attempted to freeze the accounts so your husband could not access them, this inadvertently led to you being frozen out of them instead. This was the opposite of what you had intended and must have been incredibly distressing for you, especially when you realised he’d taken £200,000.
There is no doubt as to whether Barclays was in the wrong for facilitating this arrangement, which your husband abused, as it has admitted fault. And yet beyond the £200 it initially offered you for the inconvenience, you have still not received a single penny of compensation from Barclays.
This is because Barclays assumed that the judge deciding your divorce settlement would take the missing money into account when calculating your divorce settlement during proceedings. This would mean you were no longer suffering financial loss as a result of its error.
It is true that when considering how to distribute assets in a divorce proceeding, a judge will usually take account of all potential relationship assets that have been presented to the court – which in this case should have included the amounts withdrawn by your husband.
But although the withdrawn amounts were drawn to the attention of the judge presiding over your case, you and your financial adviser felt they had not been taken into account.
You also felt the judge who ruled in your case must not have adjusted the financial settlements to compensate you for your loss as he was the same judge who gave you permission to send the judgment to and pursue your claim against Barclays. You couldn’t understand why else he would have allowed you to pursue the claim.
I asked Barclays to investigate and its legal team requested to see various parts of the judgment, none of which I was permitted to see for legal reasons. Barclays came back with what I felt were wishy-washy answers, saying it “believed” the money had been taken account of in the settlement. Blind to the legal papers myself, I told it I wouldn’t be satisfied unless it could provide a more confident answer.
Eventually Barclays came back with its final position, which is that the judge did account for the withdrawn amounts when making his decision, meaning you have not lost out financially – although I know you still feel this is wrong.
Barclays said it would be “highly unconventional” to exclude those amounts from the pool of assets to be divided and that it would expect the judge to mention this in his judgment if they were excluded, which he did not.
I’m really sorry this is not the outcome you were hoping for here but I’m afraid there is no more I can do, especially since I am not permitted to look at the judgment.
I know you feel going via the courts again would be too expensive and I understand you being reluctant to drag all this up again in court, since you have already been through enough.
Barclays should hang its head in shame for the way it failed you on the one time you truly needed it.
I wish you the very best of luck for the future.
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