The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Won’t they pay?

Please help me. I have insured my car and had an accident in Block 10 on the 13th of March. Now I just received an email that they cant help me because I was above speed limit. I was driving at 70. The police they said reckless driving. It was on a curve so someone was in my line with bright lights and I tried to move aside by the road then hit the drain. Is this really fair???

Firstly, I’m glad you had an insurance policy because it’s the smart thing to do. Even a basic vehicle insurance policy will cover you against potentially huge costs. I don’t mean the cost of any damage caused to YOUR vehicle by accident or collision, I mean the costs of damaging someone else’s vehicle. A few years ago we heard of a driver who caused a collision but who had no insurance. His car was destroyed but he also destroyed another driver’s brand new P750,000 Mercedes. Luckily for the other driver, he had an insurance policy so within a few weeks his insurance policy had paid for a replacement Mercedes. He was happy again. Unfortunately, the uninsured driver then received a demand from the victim’s insurance company demanding that he pay them back the three quarters of a million they’d paid out. Was this right, he asked? Yes, we told him, that what happens when you cause an accident and don’t have an insurance policy. You pay the bill.

In your case I think this all depends on what the text of the insurance policy says. Most insurance policies automatically reject claims if, for instance, the driver was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident. It looks like your policy says that claims are rejected if you weren’t obeying the traffic laws at the time of the incident. If you were charged by the Police they might consider that sufficient proof of this.

I’ll contact the insurance company for you and ask them to double check the small print and make sure they’ve taken the right decision.

Please help my sister!

My sister needs help. Sometime in 2009 she applied for a loan from her bank and cleared it in 2013/14. A month ago she applied for a facility to consolidate through another bank and was informed that she had been listed with CRB. Upon inquiring from the first bank, they told her that their records do not show that she cleared that loan. The say back in 2013/14 the loan balance was around 28k, and now it's at 43k

Unfortunately for her, it's been almost 7 years and she can't find her records so she is really at the mercy of the bank. They keep giving her stories that they suspect that the money was deposited into another account.

They are actually saying that they will give her a discount to pay the 43k. But why should she have to pay a loan twice when it is clearly their wrongdoing?

She says the bank never contacted her and she had never changed numbers since she started using it in 2008. They can't explain why there was never any communication from them.

Kindly advise what she can do.

The difficulty here is that it’s the responsibility of both parties to a loan, the borrower and the lender, to make sure that the loan is repaid fully and is settled finally. Very often we assume that the lender, in this case the bank, will get everything right and will keep full and accurate records. The bad news is that banks aren’t always as reliable as we need them to be. Like us, they’re flawed and lose things. It’s why it’s very important to keep bank statements, whether they’re printed or emailed somewhere safe.

I contacted the bank and asked them to take another look and see if they can trace any payments your sister made.

UPDATE: The bank assured me that they would investigate the matter urgently. I then heard from the customer that the bank managed to help her sister and they’ve cleared her name with CRB and emailed her a clearance letter.