Mortgage swaps or floating interest rate contracts are an extremely complex and risky financial product which current legislation considers unsuitable for users without special training or with no professional relation with the world of finance. Even so, over 30,000 people in Catalonia and 200,000 in the whole of Spain continue to suffer the effects of having contracted a financial product which banks and savings banks presented in the guise of insurance against future rises in the Euribor.
They omitted to explain that, if the Euribor fell, they would have to compensate the entity economically with extra payments. Far from being an element of protection, the swaps –also known as collars or clips– are highly speculative instruments that have generated enormous expenses for families and companies that were never duly informed of the risks they were running and the consequences that might derive from hypothetical falls in the Euribor. And that was what happened shortly, and by no means coincidentally, after the period of maximum intensity of the commercialisation campaigns for the swaps by the financial entities, between 2006 and 2008.
Col·lectiu Ronda has been a pioneer in the legal defence of those affected by taking out mortgage swaps and has become one of the law offices that have achieved the largest number of favourable sentences for the clients of those entities, including resolutions that have declared swaps to a value of more than 5 million euros null and void.