BUSINESS NEWS - Seventy-seven-year-old former stockbroker and debt counsellor Fanie Grove has spent most of his life in financial services, but what he saw as a debt counsellor turned him against credit forever.
One client borrowed R4 000 from a cash loan company and ended up paying back more than R60 000. That wasn’t the end of it. Lawyers for the loan company still pursued the client for a further R29 000, until Grove told them to take a hike.
After nearly a decade as a debt counsellor, Grove has become a whistleblower against abusive lending practices. He has written scores of complaints to the National Credit Regulator (NCR) since 2007, detailing how creditors are miscalculating interest on car loans and other debts, as well as loading unauthorised insurance charges onto clients’ accounts.
“People are living from pay cheque to pay cheque. More than 80% of their working lives go to repaying debts. What worries me is where we will be in 50 years’ time unless we change people’s spending and savings habits, and bring greater accountability to the lending industry.”
The country is swimming in debt, he says. It usually starts with a month-end cash crunch. The first port of call is the bank. When that source of credit is tapped out, people move onto the loan sharks and things rapidly spiral out of control.
Lawyers involved in debt recovery also see an opportunity for illicit profit. In one case lawyers attempting to recover debt on a R3 000 fridge claimed the purchase price was R18 000. “I have seen numerous instances where lawyers inflated the capital amount of the loan by 50%, and then added 30% a month interest on top of that.
“People are encouraged to borrow without asking too much about the interest rate. This is the first mistake. Once they enter the debt system they are trapped, having to borrow more to cover the interest bill. There are hordes of vultures, many with bibles under their arms, that are making fortunes in the cash loans business. In hundreds of cases I have seen, people end up in the hands of the debt counsellors, a new concept introduced under the National Credit Act (NCA), to assist debtors to reschedule their debts and gradually pay them off.”
The banks have learned to game this system, declaring the very act of going under debt review as an act of insolvency – precisely what the act was intended to prevent. The result was that banks were foreclosing on people’s houses and cars as soon as they went under debt review.
“Fortunately, the act was amended a few years ago to prevent creditors from doing this. In other words, it is no longer an act of insolvency to go under debt review, but it speaks volumes about the ethics of banks that they would circumvent the spirit and intent of the NCA, knowing that it was attempting to protect debtors from such predatory behaviour,” adds Grove.
Out of this melee arose the garnishee crisis, throwing millions of people in SA into a debt crisis. This is when lenders extended credit and obtained court orders to deduct repayments from workers’ monthly salaries – known as garnishee or emolument attachment orders (EAOs).
