Help! How to find old Alliance and Leicester account info

Driftingleaf

This might be a bit of a long shot, but my mum had an Alliance and Leicester account. I am really searching for the passbook my mum had saved from her account, because on it was a transaction of money that she leant to someone and had written on it their name nect to the transaction and kept it. My mum passed away 3 years ago, but before this we had tried to get her money back from this person, who denied ever been lending it and I was a witness to them repaying a portion of it in cash. This was clever of them to do that to show no trace of any kind of repayment. Now though I wonder if any old account info could be on record somewhere, because this money should have been repaid and now could be part of money owed to myself and my sibling, but we need the proof obviously. If I can find the passbook it would solve the problem, but if not, does anyone know any contact info to dig up info on old Alliance and Leicester accounts please?

wmb194

Driftingleaf said:

This might be a bit of a long shot, but my mum had an Alliance and Leicester account. I am really searching for the passbook my mum had saved from her account, because on it was a transaction of money that she leant to someone and had written on it their name nect to the transaction and kept it. My mum passed away 3 years ago, but before this we had tried to get her money back from this person, who denied ever been lending it and I was a witness to them repaying a portion of it in cash. This was clever of them to do that to show no trace of any kind of repayment. Now though I wonder if any old account info could be on record somewhere, because this money should have been repaid and now could be part of money owed to myself and my sibling, but we need the proof obviously. If I can find the passbook it would solve the problem, but if not, does anyone know any contact info to dig up info on old Alliance and Leicester accounts please?

Santander bought Alliance & Leicester in 2008 so you'd need to talk to it. If the account was closed a long time ago then the chances are that the record will have been deleted and it probably wouldn't talk to you unless you are your mother's executor.

Driftingleaf

wmb194 said:

Driftingleaf said:

This might be a bit of a long shot, but my mum had an Alliance and Leicester account. I am really searching for the passbook my mum had saved from her account, because on it was a transaction of money that she leant to someone and had written on it their name nect to the transaction and kept it. My mum passed away 3 years ago, but before this we had tried to get her money back from this person, who denied ever been lending it and I was a witness to them repaying a portion of it in cash. This was clever of them to do that to show no trace of any kind of repayment. Now though I wonder if any old account info could be on record somewhere, because this money should have been repaid and now could be part of money owed to myself and my sibling, but we need the proof obviously. If I can find the passbook it would solve the problem, but if not, does anyone know any contact info to dig up info on old Alliance and Leicester accounts please?

Santander bought Alliance & Leicester in 2008 so you'd need to talk to it. If the account was closed a long time ago then the chances are that the record will have been deleted and it probably wouldn't talk to you unless you are your mother's executor.

Thanks for that, I forgot Santander had taken over from A&L, but it is worth on the off chance unless I can find the passbook amongst everything! Yes, my sibling and I were the executors in our mum's will, so it would be fine for the bank to talk to us.

WillPS

Can you help me understand what a withdrawal on a passbook account would prove?

km1500

In order to prove the money had been lent you would need some kind of proof - maybe an IOU or other written document, or an independent witness to the loan. A name written next to an entry on a passbook would serve no purpose.

Wonka_2

With the greatest respect this will be a wild goose chase 

When was the money allegedly lent and is there any paperwork/documentation (excluding a name in a missing passbook) that supports the loan ?

Without any documentary evidence you're not going to get anywhere - and even with it, your success level will depend on the passage of time and how tenacious/deep your pockets are to follow it through.

Unless you have some other facts/evidence you're not declaring you're not going to see this money again

EarthBoy

Even if Santander still have a record of this account, they won't have a record of the note that your mother wrote in her passbook, showing the name of the person she lent the money to. All they would be able to tell you is that your mother withdrew £X on such and such a date. It won't be any proof that she lent that money to anybody. 

Driftingleaf

EarthBoy said:

Even if Santander still have a record of this account, they won't have a record of the note that your mother wrote in her passbook, showing the name of the person she lent the money to. All they would be able to tell you is that your mother withdrew £X on such and such a date. It won't be any proof that she lent that money to anybody. 

My mother did not withdraw the money, but it was transferred to the person because it was several thousand pounds. The person has admitted to others, who informed my sibling, that there are transactions showing on his account from the past. The person knows it was money leant to him, he repaid 2k several years ago, I witnessed this myself, so as I said it might be a bit of a long shot, but as I contacted a solicitor a few years ago and they said the old passbook was good evidence.

BooJewels

Santander may well be able to find the account - whether that helps you or not is an entirely different matter.   Someone owed my late father a chunk of money and I went through the county courts and got as far as high court enforcement officers visiting and still didn't get anything.

I had an old PO Giro account many years ago and it had just become an A&L account around the time my need for it ceased, so I just let it lapse and forgot about it.  Someone had posted here about having difficulty opening a Santander account because an old Giro account his Grandma had opened for him as a kid had the same information and they actually made that old account into a new Santander current account for him.

So on that basis I went to them about my old Giro account and they did find it and converted it to a new Santander current account, with the same account number and even found my remaining balance of £1.56. I'm still using it.  They even were able to check on an old Bradford and Bingley account of my late mothers (we thought we'd found a nice little pot of extra funds in a pass book) and reassure me that the funds had been transferred to her Santander current account on a particular date and I then found it in an old bank statement.  So they do seem to keep good records for a long while - but you may need to provide them with more information than you actually have to hand - I did at least have account numbers in both my cases.

Jami74

Do informal loans to friends become statute barred after a number of years? And would the person she lent the money to agree that it was a loan, rather than a gift, that needed to be repaid in full even after her death? And do they have the means to repay it?

I'm no expert but reading back through similar posts it seems that it's quite hard to prove that money was lent rather than gifted and if you read the debt free wannabee board you'll see that even big banks, with all their official documents and signatures and legal teams, have problems getting money back that they've lent.

Unless you believe you have a strong case and the money to pursue this debt it might be kinder to yourselves to accept that it has gone.