BGH rejects claim for higher back interest payments by savings banks
The question was about how much consumers could pay in additional installments. With the popular premium savings plans before 2004, the paid interest rate was variable. The method and timing for calculating and adjusting the interest rate were not clearly described in the contracts. Therefore, it was possible for the banks to unilaterally change it.
As early as 2004, the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruled for the first time that such clauses were invalid. For new contracts, they were changed. In October 2021, the BGH issued another fundamental ruling on older contracts. The BGH stated that banks and savings banks could not freely set variable interest rates. They had to be calculable for savers and therefore had to orient themselves to one of the benchmark interest rates of the Federal Reserve Bank. The BGH confirmed this later in other decisions.
In the cases now decided, it went about the reference interest rate, to which the premium savings contracts were supposed to refer. The Consumer Central Federation (vzbv) and the Consumer Central Saxony had sued over these matters. The Higher Regional Courts in Dresden and Naumburg based the interest rate on the yield for domestic stock market-listed federal securities with an eight- to 15-year remaining term.
However, this was not enough for consumer protection organizations. They demanded a so-called sliding average interest rate, which would be based on mortgage-backed securities and their average yield of the past ten years. This would exclude speculative elements and outliers, argued their lawyer before the court - abrupt interest rate adjustments, for example, due to debt crises, would be dampened.
If the reference interest rate were calculated in this way, the affected customers could presumably calculate with higher installments. However, the BGH did not follow the decisions of the Higher Regional Courts and decided against the consumer organizations.
The consumer organizations were satisfied with the judgment, however. "Finally, there is clarity," said Patrick Langer from the vzbv. With the now valid calculation method, there would still be "four-digit amounts" for the customers, he said. Nationwide, the vzbv calculates with several thousand affected parties.
Also satisfied with the legal certainty expressed himself Carsten Biesok, Legal Director of Sparkasse Dresden. He emphasized that his savings bank had already reached more than half of the affected parties in settlements. The effects of the judgment on the Dresden Institution were therefore rather minor.
- Due to the ruling by the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in the 90s, certain variable interest rate clauses in savings bank contracts were declared invalid.
- The demand for a sliding average interest rate, proposed by consumer protection organizations, would have helped mitigate abrupt interest rate adjustments and excluded speculative elements.
- In the 2000s, the BGH started to enforce that banks and savings banks had to base variable interest rates on one of the benchmark interest rates of the German Bundesbank.
- The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in Karlsruhe ruled against the consumer organizations in the recent cases concerning interest arrears, however, not following the method proposed by the Higher Regional Courts.
- Savings banks, such as Sparkasse Dresden, have been actively addressing the issue of interest arrears, settling with a significant portion of the affected customers before the BGH's final ruling.
