Novobanco ordered to pay €200K to investor

Novobanco and Banco Best have been ordered by a court to return €200,000 plus interest to a saver whose investments were swallowed up by the 2014 BES bonds fiasco.

The saver had unwittingly invested the money in BES bonds even through he had specifically said that he wanted low-risk Novobanco products that had nothing to do with BES bonds which were subsequently rendered valueless when that bank collapsed in 2014.
The Court of Póvoa do Varzim ruled in favour of the investor who has accused the two banks of fleecing him.
The customer wanted to invest €200,000. The time was ‘late 2014’, explains SIC, and after the collapse of BES, and the ‘creation’ of the so-called ‘good bank’ Novo Banco with the non-toxic assets of BES.
But despite his request for safe products, he was actually sold BES bonds — bonds that a year later were ‘retroactively dumped’ by order of the Bank of Portugal: they were taken out of Novobanco and transferred into what was left of BES (by then known as the bad or toxic bank).
The Portugal Resident states that according to reports, the possibility that this could happen was in the small print. But the customer was certainly unaware of it, and now the court has ruled the banks breached their duty of information by not properly communicating this risk to the investor.
The banks, which claim that the risk of this happening was clearly in the small print, are to appeal the court’s decision. If overturned, the customer may never seen the colour of their money again.