During the month and a half of the war, many Ukrainians lost their homes. It has been destroyed by bombing and rocket attacks. Moreover, many of the destroyed apartments were purchased on credit, and the owners have not even paid the mortgage for them yet. Now the owners of the destroyed houses are worried that they will have to return the money to the bank for housing that is no longer there. And this is actually true: a mortgage loan is repayable, like all other loans. Moreover, it will have to be returned in any case, explains Lyubov Marchenko for Today.ua.
This was told to Ukrainians by lawyers specializing in legal relations in the field of real estate.
During the war, Ukrainian banks provided their clients with credit holidays. In fact, customers will not be liable for late payments, and no penalties can be applied to them. However, credit holidays mean only the possibility of deferring credit payments. Borrowers will still have to return debts to banks, including mortgages.
Even if the apartment is destroyed, the payment of the loan for it continues
To stop paying the debt, you need to register the destroyed housing in a special state register. Then the owner of the destroyed apartment will have the right to pay insurance for it. And, having received money from the insurance company, he will be able to pay off the bank.
As lawyer Tatyana Kozachenko notes, as a rule, insurance companies work with banks. Therefore, they often return money for destroyed housing not to the client, but immediately directly to the bank.
“The obligation of a person to return a loan to a bank does not disappear anywhere. If an insurance company must compensate money directly to the bank for the destruction of property, then it’s understandable. Then in this part the money will be returned directly to the bank,” says Kozachenko.
After the war everything will be different
However, these mechanisms for compensating money for lost housing were created and adapted to peacetime, when insured events were isolated. Now, in connection with the war, there are a lot of such cases in the country. And, obviously, here the payment mechanism will be different. A new mechanism for the return of mortgage loans for destroyed houses will have to be developed and adopted at the level of law.
The National Bank promises to solve this problem after the war. The head of the NBU, Kirill Shevchenko, believes that borrowers who have lost their homes should not be forced to pay off loans according to the generally accepted scheme. And you can not leave them alone with their problems.
