The Supreme Court dictates that mortgages affected by the IRPH must be analyzed case by case
The Supreme Court concludes that it is not possible to provide a “univocal” solution to the mortgages affected by the IRPH or Mortgage Loan Reference Index and that determining Its “abusiveness” will depend on the specific circumstances of each loan, but also of each litigation, depending on “the facts that are proven in it.” In two rulings dated November 11, the civil court has analyzed the validity of the clause following the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) at the end of last year. This determined that the indicator can be considered abusive if the entity did not transparently inform the consumer; although it left the task of reviewing each specific case in the hands of the national courts (in this case, the Supreme Court).
The CJEU understood that the fact that this is an official index does not imply that bad faith in these loans must be ruled out. The IRPH is an official interest rate prepared at the time by the Bank of Spain that It was used for a time to review the installments of variable mortgages. It was calculated with the average of the interest rates applied by financial institutions on their mortgage loans for more than three years. The indicator was considered not very transparent because it gave rise to higher fees compared to the Euribor, which led thousands of clients to judicially claim its nullity.
