C&G clarifies payment rules
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Your support makes all the difference.CHELTENHAM & Gloucester Building Society has written to all its savers with membership accounts who do not appear to qualify for payments when the society is bought by Lloyds Bank.
The High Court ruled in June that only members who had held their accounts for at least two years were eligible for payments. Savers whose membership has been broken at some time since 31 December 1992 are not legally entitled to any payout. This will include cases where the first named person on a joint account has changed; those who have changed from a share account such as London Share to a deposit account such as London Deposit; and those who closed a share account and opened another one after an interval.
It is unbroken membership that counts. So savers who have changed accounts may still qualify for payments.
C&G has tried to clean up its membership records, but there may be cases where an appeal will result in a payment. For instance if a woman changed her name on marriage, accounts held in two different names will not have registered as continuous membership. Cases where a new account is opened with a different address would also not have registered on C&G's records.
Where the first named person on a joint account dies before completion day the account will not qualify for a payment. The membership cannot be transferred to the second named member.
Two-year members with at least pounds 100 in their accounts will recieve pounds 500 per account plus a percentage of the balance, likely to be about 13 per cent. Those with less than pounds 100 in their accounts on 31 December 1994 will receive just the percentage.
Deposit accounts of pounds 100 or more on 31 March 1994 also receive pounds 500 plus the percentage, while those with smaller balances receive just the percentage.
Borrowers have been excluded from the payout, which will distribute the pounds 1.8bn that Lloyds Bank is paying to take over the society.
The details of the takeover are expected in February with a special meeting to vote on the proposal in March.
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