A man who has hardly paid any of his mortgage for 12 years looks set to be given his home after a High Court judge ruled his bank had left it too late to repossess it. London Estate agents Barbican Property Clerkenwell Flats
Djabar Babai wrote to the solicitors for Natwest Bank in September 1999 telling them he had "lost everything" around 10 years earlier and was now unemployed.
Three years later the bank told him he still owed them £61,887 for the detached 1960s home in Heaton Mersey, Stockport.
He agreed to repay the mortgage at £40 a month but only made a small number of the promised payments, the High Court was told.
Two years later, in January 2004, Mr Babai was declared bankrupt and by October last year that debt had spiralled to around £165,000 on a property valued at over £200,000. But Judge Richard Arnold, QC, sitting at London's High Court, said Natwest had no claim on the property under the Limitation Act 1980.
The law, which enshrines the principle commonly known as "squatters rights", says actions for possession of land must be brought within 12 years.
The letter Mr Babai had sent in 1999 was "too ambiguous," said the judge, to be an "acknowledgement" of the mortgage as Natwest had claimed.
He said the bank's "right of action" began in 1992 and any claim for possession was now "statute barred".
It means the mortgage over Mr Babai's home is now "extinguished" and Natwest no longer has any right to seek to enforce its debt.
The court also heard that Mr Babai is the registered owner of the property, along with his wife Zinat Babai.
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