The Emperor’s new mortgage, continued
October: email ping-pong
In August the very friendly judge had told me I could come back to court and apply for an injunction. It’s a long story, but I ended up with two claim numbers. One claim I never felt confident enough to fill in, so it was never issued. The other I had filled in, and it’s a simple one: I want my personal data, which the Co-operative Bank still hasn’t given me in full.
So in October, out of the blue, I applied for an injunction. Cue chaos at Eversheds, the Bank’s lawyers. They had to think on their feet, and it showed.
On 23 October the Master (another very learned judge, and very pleasant in emails via her clerk) sent my application to judges’ listing, which is where someone decides which day it will be heard. The next day Eversheds told the court my application was “misguided and without merit” and shouldn’t get a hearing at all. That made me smile. It still does.
That evening I emailed a friend:
“Well, it’s been a fun day of ping-pong email tennis today. The Master sent my injunction to be listed for a hearing, the bank tried to stop it, I kept going, the Bank tried to stop it again by saying they had no legal title, and I showed they were telling lies by sending a copy of the Land Registry charge. So a normal day for the Co-op.”
I’m not trying to wind anyone up. I’m fairly down to earth (not daft, not a genius) and I say it as it is. But the whole thing only works if everyone agrees to admire the Emperor’s new clothes. I couldn’t see them, so I said so.
The cunning plan
What I wanted was simple: stop Topaz registering its interest in my mortgage until the Co-op handed over my personal data.
Here’s what I found out later. (I’m not a lawyer. It took a while.)
On 23 October, in the late afternoon, the very day the Master sent my application to be listed, the 0% interest rate on my mortgage (that I had terminated when the Bank kept pretending that I had agreed to the 0%) was extended by another four months, “approved by legal”. A “High-Risk Vulnerable Case Panel” had been looking at my case. I hadn’t told Topaz anything about my application. Topaz later confirmed there would be no enforcement while the 0% lasted.
My guess at the plan: if I got anywhere near an injunction, someone would stand up and tell the judge there was nothing to worry about. Nobody was going to repossess me, so what did I need protecting from?
How do I know what the 0% was for? Because Topaz told me. In December it wrote that the extra four months were to allow time for, among other things, “the transfer of the charge to be registered at the Land Registry” and for my “injunction application … to fall away”. It pinned that on my other “claim”, the one that had never been issued. Details.
Meanwhile, on 28 October Eversheds told me in writing that it was “not instructed by Topaz”. By 2 December, Topaz was telling me that, just like the Co-op, it used Eversheds as its solicitors, “although such instruction is entirely coincidental”. Of course it is.
I hadn’t yet realised I was up against the gruesome twosome. Had I known that the Co-op and Topaz were working together, and that the 0% rate and the pause on enforcement were meant to let my injunction application “fall away”, I would have carried on. Instead, facing a bill of about £9,000 for the Bank’s barrister, I didn’t press it. The defendants wanted it recorded as “totally without merit”, and to avoid the costs I didn’t argue. The judge later wrote that the label applied to that one application only. It didn’t apply to my data claim, or to my other claim (which wasn’t yet a claim, but did have a number).
I don’t suppose anyone mentioned to the judge that the Co-op and Topaz were in it together, but Topaz still enjoyed rubbing my nose in it. On 2 December, in a letter copied to the FCA, it told me my application had been “struck out as being entirely without merit”. I could almost hear the victory trumpet. So within a month, “dismissed” had become “struck out”, and “totally” had become “entirely”. Another month and I’d have been banned from the building.
As for the plan, nobody had to leak it. Topaz wrote it down, put it in a letter and copied in the regulator. Clever people, lawyers. I don’t imagine they were thrilled.
And the timing? The application to register Topaz’s transfer went in to the Land Registry the day before the hearing. My credit report says my “arrangement to pay” with Topaz started the day after it.
The serious bit
I had made it clear that, in my view, no court would ever accept how the Co-operative Bank treated me: the interest rate hiked, enforcement again and again for arrears I didn’t owe, and me driven to the point of feeling suicidal.
So how do you stop a court agreeing with me? You make it look as if I happily agreed an “arrangement to pay”, first with the Co-op and then with Topaz. I say the Bank started telling that story in the summer of 2025, which is why I went to the High Court in the first place: to get the truth down in a witness statement. After October, I say, the documents were fabricated to match, and the story went onto my credit file.
And then
On 16 April 2026 I wrote to Eversheds and Topaz, copying in the FCA, and said the conduct I was seeing was “potentially engaging conspiracy to defraud”. A week later Eversheds replied that it was “no longer instructed by Topaz in relation to these matters”. Topaz had moved to TLT.
The next month, I finally saw what had really been going on.