The Banbury Guardian recently reported on the tale of a Banbury man who is taking Oxfordshire County Council to court regarding their ongoing use of Lender Option Borrower Option loans or LOBOs. 29-year old Ben Mobbs submitted a ‘Notice of Formal Objection’ to the council to request the release of its statement of accounts for the fiscal year 2015-16. Mr. Mobbs is one of many people challenging their local councils regarding usage of these long-term loans offered from the big banks. Due to the central Government and the FCA failing to take any action on the big banks, it has increasingly fallen to local residents to pick up the slack and commence applying pressure to force councils to cease taking out LOBO loans.
Mr. Mobbs has been working in tandem with Debt Resistance UK, an independent body, in order to research and be granted access to this sensitive information. During the interview, Mr. Mobbs said;
“I look into a lot of local council activities, district council and county council, local politics, what are the MPs doing, what aren’t doing and trying to maintain a dialogue with them.”
Oxfordshire County Council have a collection of LOBO loans totalling around £50 million. In documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, it was discovered that the Council took out these loans between July 2005 and Oxtober 2006 and that each individual loan was for the sum of £5 million with starting interest rates ranging from 2.65 per cent up to 4.5 per cent.
Here at Vedanta Hedging, we have long been fighting against these LOBO loans and in the past have even given live oral evidence to a Select Committee of MPs in Westminster regarding these mis-sold loans.
To read more on the Banbury Guardian article, feel free to click here.