The Supreme Court’s decision on the IRPH leaves one million families in the hands of justice

The Supreme Court has finally ruled on the Mortgage Loan Reference Index (IRPH), the questioned indicator with which nearly a million Spaniards have contracted their mortgages with a significant extra cost compared to the other most used index, the Euribor.

The high court has taken several months to clarify its position on the index, after the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) considered that the evaluation of whether the clauses They are abusive, it must be done on a case-by-case basis. and taking into account whether it was marketed with transparency, in addition to comparing the interest rates resulting from the clause with those that were applied at that time in the market.

Along the same lines, the Supreme Court considers that there is no univocal solution regarding the abuse of the variable interest clause referenced to the IRPH, which It will depend on the individualized examination in each case.

This destroys the claims of consumer associations, which hoped that the Supreme Court was blunt and declared the abusiveness of the indexin which a million families in Spain are trapped, who only have to go to court. Spanish banks used the IRPH as an alternative to the Euribor by presenting it as a more stable index, compared to the rises and falls of an indicator that banks in the euro zone lend money to.

But this meant increases in the installments of the mortgages affected by between 200 and 300 euros per month, according to the calculations of affected platforms such as Asufin or IRPH Stop Gipuzkoa. It is an index that “was sold as more stable than the Euribor when the reality, as the curves demonstrate, always places it above, contributing to making mortgages more expensive by a systematic range of between 200 and 300 euros per month,” they explain from Asufín.

The founding partner of the Navas & Cusí law firm Juan Ignacio Navas introduces another element of criticism, since he foresees that “forcing the case-by-case examination will only serve to collapse the judicial system and delay a banking contingency of more than 15,000 million euros”.

The truth is that the Supreme Court expressly refers in one of the rulings made public this week to the inappropriateness of comparing both indices. The magistrates point out that, “in any case, this comparison between IRPH and Euribor must be made with extreme caution, because there is a lack of data to know What would have been the differential that would have been applied to the loan? if it had been referenced to the Euribor”.

The different evolutions

The IRPH began to be controversial between 2013 and 2016, when it stabilized at around 2% while the Euribor – the most used – even gave way to negative territory, which led many consumers to appeal it as abusive. The IRPH reached its historical maximum in January 2001, when it reached 6.390% and its minimum in November 2021 at 1.412%.

The 12-month Euribor reached its maximum in July 2008 (5.361%), fell from 0% in February 2016 (-0.008%) and in spring 2018 a slight upward trend began; The lowest Euribor in history was in January 2021, with a negative rate of 0.505%.

The Euribor was negative for more than six years, from February 2016 to April 2022, and from mid-2012 to 2022 both indices maintained a differential of just over two basis points.