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.”
(The Land Registry still showed MAS5 as the owner of the charge. Topaz’s transfer wasn’t registered until 11 November.)
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. Once my mortgage had gone to Topaz, the Co-op would have no reason left to hand my data over. While an injunction was holding up the registration, it had every reason to.
Here’s what I found out later. (I’m not a lawyer.)
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 (the mortgage 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 yet told Topaz anything about my October 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.
Then, in February, Topaz told me it wasn’t aware of that claim. Or any claim: “We are not aware of any claim (or threatened claim) by yourself against The Co-operative Bank plc.” In December, Topaz knew my claim’s number, and cited it as a reason for extending my rate. By February, it had never heard of it. Topaz’s memory, like my 0% rate, seems to have been a temporary concession. Which claim? →
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, helped by Eversheds, and that the 0% rate and the pause on enforcement were meant to let my injunction application “fall away”, I would have carried on. But I had applied for my injunction in my data claim, instead of in my other claim (the one that wasn’t yet a claim, but did have a number). It seems I had unintentionally breached High Court etiquette. I might have got my injunction; I might not. If I didn’t, it would cost me £9,000 for a half-hour hearing: the bill for the Bank’s barrister. So I didn’t press it. The defendants wanted the application 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, and that the order did not say I had agreed it. It didn’t apply to my data claim, or to my other one.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the Bank’s barrister was also arguing Topaz’s corner. The Bank’s skeleton argument, which is in my bundle from that day, says: “The party who will be prejudiced by the injunction is Topaz.” And: “It is manifestly unjust for an injunction to be granted without hearing from Topaz.” I had told Topaz the hearing was taking place. When it didn’t turn up, I assumed it just wasn’t interested.
I did suspect, on the day, that something slippery was afoot. After the hearing the Co-op’s lawyers told me, through my volunteer barrister, that I had to serve the judge’s order on Topaz. I didn’t. A month or two earlier I had lodged an objection to the transfer at the Land Registry, and my objection was holding it up. Entirely by coincidence, the application to register Topaz’s transfer had gone in the day before the hearing. So why was the Co-op so keen for Topaz to have an order showing I hadn’t got my injunction? As I see it, the Co-op wanted me and my mortgage off its hands as quickly as possible, and Topaz, it turned out, was doing all it could to help, with the 0% rate and the pause on enforcement. For an ex-paramedic with a head injury, it takes a while to put two and two together.
I don’t suppose anyone mentioned to the judge that the Co-op and Topaz were in it together (and I have no reason to think the volunteer barrister who helped me on the day knew either), but Topaz still enjoyed rubbing my nose in it. Well, for a while. I imagine it was Eversheds writing Topaz’s letters, and they didn’t expect to see them again a year later. On 2 December, in a letter copied to the FCA, Topaz 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? As I said earlier, 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.
And my data? I didn’t get my injunction, and the Co-op still hasn’t given me all of it. Worse, Topaz has redacted at least 277 pages of the file it now holds, 80 of them blacked out completely. Eleven of those sit between the Bank’s letters of 18 and 24 December 2019, years before Topaz had anything to do with my mortgage.
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.
I’ve had a lot of time on my hands since my car crash, and I started to join the dots about these mortgages, and the Co-op Bank “is aware”. I would have met them to discuss my exit, but that time “came to an end” when, I say, they started plotting my less graceful departure with the 0% narrative.
The people who discuss me, at the Co-op or Topaz or both, appear in the diary as the “High-Risk Vulnerable Case Panel”. The diary records the purpose of the 0% rate: “to allow the customer to continue his legal case”. How helpful. But I had copied the FCA into my dealings with Eversheds, and when Topaz wrote to me in December, with the FCA copied in, it said what I say the 0% was really for: the Land Registry, and my injunction falling away.
So how do you stop a court agreeing with me when I say I accepted MAS5’s repudiatory breach and terminated the contract? 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. 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.