Forgive the non-aviation content but my company is owed €600.00 by a German company; they refunded this amount to the third party intermediary that I use for international money transfers instead of to my company directly and that intermediary needs them to recall that money. I cannot do it from my end and they say they cannot do it either..
Does anybody have any idea how one would go about persuing this?
I only ask because we have such an international and successful group!
Stickandrudderman wrote:
…and that intermediary needs them to recall that money.
Where is the problem? He just transfers it back to them. And yes, it is true: One can not recall money transfers here. If you make a mistake with the numbers and the (wrong) recipient of the money wants to keep the money there is no easy way to get it back.
It’s more a case of the sender sending the money to the wrong account and insisting that they cannot rectify their mistake.
Stickandrudderman wrote:
It’s more a case of the sender sending the money to the wrong account and insisting that they cannot rectify their mistake.
Yes, but they are right. At this point there is not much they can do. They (or you) must convince the wrong recipient to either transfer the money back to them or forward it to you. If he wants to keep if for himself there is no easy ( * ) way to get it back.
( * ) Legally he is obliged to give the money back if it was wrongly transferred to him. The only way to force him to do that is to file a lawsuit against him. The cost of which will be higher than the amount due so he can be pretty sure that it is not going to happen. (Generally it is not worth litigating over amounts less than 1000 Euros here). But as he is your common business partner there should be no problem here I guess.
As an aside – why do you use a ‘third party intermediary’, especially for trivial sums like that? Just curious. Int’l transfers are two or three clicks on my computer….
He’s probably using a third-party because the banks here will charge a considerable premium on GBP-EUR forex rates.
I cannot do it from my end and they say they cannot do it either..
They are washing their hands of their mistake. They should cover it from their own pocket, and then maybe recoup their loss by recovering it from the recipient. That’s what I would do if I was them.
But if they only followed your instructions, that’s a bugger… you just have to keep asking whoever will listen.
FWIW. in the UK, there are some precedents whereby if the recipient of the money spent it in a genuine belief that it was his, you can’t get it back.
However last week I got a letter from our bank drawing our attention to the “new policy” that money paid into our bank via a transfer is (paraphrasing) not ever ours and can be taken back out. I imagine they want to be able to recover proceeds of fraud, etc. Everybody knows that credit cards can be reversed (for up to x months, etc) but everybody thought that bank transfers were irrevocable. We get a fair number of obvious scams where a credit card payment is offered and we used to say to them that if they pay by a bank transfer they can have the goods, but we might stop doing that (none of them went for it). What evidence the bank needs to reverse the money, I have no idea.
Peter wrote:
They should cover it from their own pocket, and then maybe recoup their loss by recovering it from the recipient.
That would be the gentleman’s way to do it. But then, gentlemen instead of transferring money by bank will rather send their butler to hand over the amount in cash 
Peter wrote:
However last week I got a letter from our bank drawing our attention to the “new policy” that money paid into our bank via a transfer is (paraphrasing) not ever ours and can be taken back out.
That sounds like an attempt to combat Criminal cashback
Going back to the original post, unless the German company sent the money in accordance with your instructions, it sounds like: they owed you money, they haven’t paid it to you yet, they still owe you money.
what_next wrote:
That would be the gentleman’s way to do it. But then, gentlemen instead of transferring money by bank will rather send their butler to hand over the amount in cash
When I started working in the City of London, there were still “Bank Messengers” who would settle £millions trades in Bearer Bonds by carrying the certificates between banks in brief-cases. In principle, a Bearer Bond Certificate is cash.
what_next wrote:
That would be the gentleman’s way to do it. But then, gentlemen instead of transferring money by bank will rather send their butler to hand over the amount in cash
He was on annual leave……………….
Finners is right, it’s cheaper to use a third party.
The German company had been paid via the third party.
Later they were obliged to refund €600 which they did without consulting me by returning the money from whence it came. A reasonable mistake to make.
The recipient (the third party) has acknowledged receipt of the money but because I didn’t send it I have no authority to get them to return it, the sender has to ask for it.
The German company says that their bank cannot do it.
The third party says that there are forms to be filled out by the sending bank and have sent me those which I’ve forwarded to the German company for them in turn to forward to their bank.
This is where I’ve hit a brick wall as they are not co-operating.
In the UK I would have no problems dealing with this; it’s the senders mistake and they continue to owe me the money until such time as I have received it.
Across international borders is not quite so simple.!
€600 may not be the end of the world but I’d rather not gift it to the intermediary and it makes my book-keepers life unnecessarily difficult.
