These are New Year's gifts which she would have done well: the British subsidiary of the Santander bank mistakenly distributed 130 million pounds (more than 150 million euros) on Christmas day that it intends to recover.
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On December 25, due to a "
technical problem
", 75,000 payments made by some 2,000 professional clients of the bank were duplicated in the accounts of their beneficiaries, the bank said Thursday in a statement sent to AFP, confirming information from The Times newspaper.
Open recovery procedure
The duplicate transactions were directly debited from the bank's cash registers and "
no customer has paid out of pocket at any time,
" Santander assured, specifying that he works "
with many banks across the United Kingdom to recover
”the sums concerned.
The beneficiaries of the transfers were notably employees or suppliers of certain client companies of Santander - who thus received their wages or their payment twice.
The transfers were made to accounts at several other UK banks, making it difficult to collect the funds, according to The Times.
The newspaper said that one of these establishments told him that it was reluctant to recover the money if it meant going overdrawn the account holder.
Santander said he had "
quickly identified and corrected
" a planning problem at the origin of the erroneous payments, adding to have opened with the beneficiary banks a "
bank error recovery procedure
".
The UK branch of Spanish bank Santander has 14 million customers and posted a net profit of over £ 1 billion for the first nine months of 2021.