MG with AFP –
Unlikely gifts. Because of a “Technical problem”, the British branch of Santander bank mistakenly distributed 130 million pounds (over 150 million euros) on Christmas Day. On December 25, 75,000 payments made by some 2,000 professional customers of the bank were duplicated in the accounts of their beneficiaries, the bank said Thursday in a statement sent to AFP. Most of the “lucky ones” were employees or suppliers of some Santander client companies – who therefore received their wages or payment twice. These sums were debited directly from the bank’s cash registers and “no customer has paid out of pocket at any time”, assured Santander.
After this incident, the group announced to work “with many banks across the UK to recover” money. However, according to The Times, the transfers were made to accounts at several other UK banks, making it difficult to collect the funds. All the more so as one of the said establishments has indicated that it is reluctant to recover the sums concerned if it means making the account holder overdrawn, notes the British daily. Regardless, Santander claimed to have “quickly identified and corrected” the problem at the origin of this blunder and initiated with the beneficiary banks a “bank error recovery procedure”.