ktlight
17th July 2011, 05:59
FYI:
Byron Fraser’s voice is trembling as he talks to me on his mobile phone. ‘I’ve built a barricade but the police are kicking it down,’ he tells me. ‘And there’s another thing. I’ve doused myself in petrol. If they come through the door I’m going to set myself alight.’
The sound of frantic banging in the background tells me there are only seconds to spare, but somehow I manage to persuade this desperate man to put down his matches long enough for me to call Lincolnshire Police.
When I tell them about the situation, their response is swift and decisive.
The officers who have been hammering on the door are pulled back, trained negotiators are brought in and after a four-hour stand-off, a petrol-soaked and emotional Byron Fraser finally gives himself up.
Such extreme behaviour and unwillingless to face police must, surely, have followed some terrible criminal activity. Had Byron robbed a bank, been dealing drugs or kidnapped a child?
Actually, no. Byron, 55, is a perfectly respectable man — he worked as a head chef — whose only crime was to put his trust in a bank when he took out a five-year loan for £15,000.
On top of that loan, Byron was talked into paying a huge premium — £4,345.44 — for ‘payment protection insurance’, or PPI, in case loss of work or sickness rendered him unable to meet his monthly repayments.
So when, two years later, he was in a car crash, lost one leg, crushed the other and broke his neck, you might think the last thing he had to worry about was that loan.
But you would be wrong. Not only was the loan not wholly covered by the insurance, but the relentless pursuit of Byron to repay the debt has resulted in his being made bankrupt.
Last month he lost his house and from the initial £15,000 loan he has been saddled with interest, fees and costs amounting, astonishingly, to more than £250,000. The result? He felt he had no option but to kill himself.
Byron’s story is one of the most extraordinary accounts you will read of a far wider scandal that has affected enormous numbers of the British people.
In 2009, the Financial Services Authority ordered the banks to stop selling single-payment PPI insurance premiums like the one sold to Byron, following concerns that undue pressure was being put on borrowers to buy them. The scandal had been exposed by the Money Mail pages of this newspaper.
And in April this year, the High Court went further and ruled that the banks should pay compensation amounting to an estimated £4.5 billion to 1.5 million people who were sold PPI policies that they either didn’t require, didn’t want or, in many cases, which didn’t actually cover their needs.
That ruling came too late to help Byron, who was declared bankrupt five years ago and has been battling to save his home ever since.
But his story is a shocking insight into the way a small loan — a loan that was supposed to be protected — can become a debt of a quarter of a million pounds and destroy a life.
My call to Byron — the call he says saved his life — came purely by chance. I had been conducting research for an article on home repossessions and had approached the homeless charity Shelter for help in finding a case study.
They had recently been contacted for help by Byron and offered to put me in touch. By sheer chance, I made my first call to him at the precise moment he was about to commit suicide by setting himself alight inside his home, repossessed last month.
‘I realise that people might think I’m crazy to even consider setting myself alight, but I had lost the will to live,’ he told me the next morning, the day after the stand-off. Overnight, he had been assessed under the Mental Health Act to see whether he ought to be sectioned, but was found to be sane. In fact, a person would have to be mad not to feel as angry as he does.
source to read more
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2015342/Ive-just-doused-petrol-Im-going-set-alight-The-chilling-words-victim-left-250-000-debt.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Byron Fraser’s voice is trembling as he talks to me on his mobile phone. ‘I’ve built a barricade but the police are kicking it down,’ he tells me. ‘And there’s another thing. I’ve doused myself in petrol. If they come through the door I’m going to set myself alight.’
The sound of frantic banging in the background tells me there are only seconds to spare, but somehow I manage to persuade this desperate man to put down his matches long enough for me to call Lincolnshire Police.
When I tell them about the situation, their response is swift and decisive.
The officers who have been hammering on the door are pulled back, trained negotiators are brought in and after a four-hour stand-off, a petrol-soaked and emotional Byron Fraser finally gives himself up.
Such extreme behaviour and unwillingless to face police must, surely, have followed some terrible criminal activity. Had Byron robbed a bank, been dealing drugs or kidnapped a child?
Actually, no. Byron, 55, is a perfectly respectable man — he worked as a head chef — whose only crime was to put his trust in a bank when he took out a five-year loan for £15,000.
On top of that loan, Byron was talked into paying a huge premium — £4,345.44 — for ‘payment protection insurance’, or PPI, in case loss of work or sickness rendered him unable to meet his monthly repayments.
So when, two years later, he was in a car crash, lost one leg, crushed the other and broke his neck, you might think the last thing he had to worry about was that loan.
But you would be wrong. Not only was the loan not wholly covered by the insurance, but the relentless pursuit of Byron to repay the debt has resulted in his being made bankrupt.
Last month he lost his house and from the initial £15,000 loan he has been saddled with interest, fees and costs amounting, astonishingly, to more than £250,000. The result? He felt he had no option but to kill himself.
Byron’s story is one of the most extraordinary accounts you will read of a far wider scandal that has affected enormous numbers of the British people.
In 2009, the Financial Services Authority ordered the banks to stop selling single-payment PPI insurance premiums like the one sold to Byron, following concerns that undue pressure was being put on borrowers to buy them. The scandal had been exposed by the Money Mail pages of this newspaper.
And in April this year, the High Court went further and ruled that the banks should pay compensation amounting to an estimated £4.5 billion to 1.5 million people who were sold PPI policies that they either didn’t require, didn’t want or, in many cases, which didn’t actually cover their needs.
That ruling came too late to help Byron, who was declared bankrupt five years ago and has been battling to save his home ever since.
But his story is a shocking insight into the way a small loan — a loan that was supposed to be protected — can become a debt of a quarter of a million pounds and destroy a life.
My call to Byron — the call he says saved his life — came purely by chance. I had been conducting research for an article on home repossessions and had approached the homeless charity Shelter for help in finding a case study.
They had recently been contacted for help by Byron and offered to put me in touch. By sheer chance, I made my first call to him at the precise moment he was about to commit suicide by setting himself alight inside his home, repossessed last month.
‘I realise that people might think I’m crazy to even consider setting myself alight, but I had lost the will to live,’ he told me the next morning, the day after the stand-off. Overnight, he had been assessed under the Mental Health Act to see whether he ought to be sectioned, but was found to be sane. In fact, a person would have to be mad not to feel as angry as he does.
source to read more
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2015342/Ive-just-doused-petrol-Im-going-set-alight-The-chilling-words-victim-left-250-000-debt.html?ito=feeds-newsxml