The Sunday Times May 1, 2022 15
MONEY
The delivery
of my Porsche
turned into
a car crash
in Cagnes-sur-Mer, which she discovered
had been closed. On our behalf, she
phoned the Milleis helpline on four
occasions over five weeks. Each time,
the staff were very polite, promised to
pass on the requests to their superiors,
and that a written response would be
sent to me. Again, nothing happened.Jill replies
French banks are usually difficult for
agony aunts like me to deal with. UK
banks can ask customers to provide
letters of authority confirming that theirgood French. Again, I had no reply. I
re-sent the emails on March 15.
I explained that we have been unable
to access our accounts online because
our access codes were changed. I
remember getting a message that new
ones would be sent by courrier postal but
I did not get them. Also we received a
French tax refund in August 2020 for
€2,478 and need to check that it was paid
into our account. My wife’s debit card
expired and a new one was not sent.
In June 2021, a French friend offered
to help us by visiting the Milleis branchO
n January 13 I took delivery
of a Porsche Cayenne that
cost £38,750. I had traded
in a six-year-old BMW X1 in
very good condition. The
Porsche was described as
having three minor
“imperfections” and I was
told that it would be fully
serviced before it arrived.
I informed Cazoo that my driveway
was narrow and asked it to note this for
the driver. Cazoo said that the driver
would call 15 minutes before arrival and
I could tell him about the driveway then.
The driver never called and the first I
knew of his arrival was seeing him stuck
against the wall of my driveway, having
reversed his delivery vehicle into it. He
said he would log the damage and I
would be compensated.
To make things worse the car had lots
of undocumented scratches and in the
end Cazoo sent an expert out who
agreed. I then found out that the car had
not been serviced as promised.
In the end I gave up and swapped it
for a Jaguar I-Pace electric car, for which
I paid £43,000 in cash while I waited for
the car loan finance company, Black
Horse, to refund my HP agreement. To
the delivery driver’s horror, the Jaguar
had about 20 imperfections. When I
tried to charge up the vehicle it didn’t
accept the charge, so I couldn’t even test
drive it and had to return it to Cazoo for
a full refund, which took about five days.
Despite daily emails to Cazoo asking it
to settle the debt to Black Horse, more
than three weeks after the return of the
original car, £540 was taken from my
account. It was only when I included you
on cc that Cazoo finally settled the debt,
but I am still waiting for the money that
Black Horse took from my account.
Incredibly, five weeks after the
damage to my garden wall, I still haven’t
been contacted by Cazoo’s insurers,
despite chasing daily and I have lost myperfectly good BMW X1. The staff at
Cazoo have tried to help, but the
business appears to be woefully let down
by whoever inspects the vehicles and a
lack of process when things go wrong.Jill replies
I have not received a complaint about
Cazoo before, but your experience more
than made up for this. You returned the
second car to Cazoo on February 11, a
month after this debacle started with the
demolition of your driveway dry stone
wall. Cazoo says it processed a refund
the next day, and then on the 14th the
first payment was taken from your
account for the first car, which you had
long since returned.
On February 18 I asked Cazoo to sort
out the refund of your £540, to chase its
insurer about repairs to your dry stone
wall and to consider what compensation
it was going to pay you for the
inconvenience you had suffered.
Much of the delay seems to have been
caused by Cazoo’s insurer, but the car
retailer would not reveal which
company it was so I could not help to
encourage it into action. The damage to
your wall was eventually inspected and
after further delays you were invited to
get a quote from a builder of your
choice. This came in at £2,800 plus VAT
— clearly too much for the insurer
because all then went quiet again.
But after continual chivvying, the
quote was approved.
I could see from the fairly constant
emails to and from Cazoo that the firm
really was trying to sort matters out, but
it admits that the delay in mending your
wall “took far more time than it should”.
Cazoo points out that it made sure you
were not left out of pocket, and that it
has sold more than 60,000 cars online
in the past two years with 95 per cent of
its customers rating its service as either
‘Excellent’ or ‘Great’ on Trustpilot. You
must be very unlucky then to get two
cars in a row that had issues. Cazoo has
paid you £1,000 in compensation to
make up for the disappointment.Lost in France
My wife and I have had an account with
the French bank Milleis for about 15
years, from the time I was working in the
international church in Cannes. After tenQUESTION
OF MONEY
JILL INSLEY
years of retirement near Grasse, we
received news that our youngest son had
terminal cancer. We sold our house and
came back to England in October 2019.
As we hoped to return to France to
visit friends, we kept our Milleis account
open with about €3,000 in and retained
our Cartes Bleues debit cards. Sadly
we have been unable to travel, so in
February 2021, I sent an email to Milleis,
asking to close our account and transfer
the balance to our English account. As I
did not receive a reply, I wrote again on
February 19, this time in my not verybank can discuss account details with
third parties. But French legislation
prohibits financial institutions from
sharing confidential information about
a customer with a third party, and letters
of authority have no value.
So I was pleased to find that Milleis
had a PR agency that was able and
willing to talk to me. A week after I sent
your complaint, you received a payment
for just under £3,000. However you
were expecting about £5,000, so I asked
for account statements for the past
couple of years so you could see what
had happened to your money. You had
already asked twice for these to be sent
to you — but this time they arrived.
The statements showed that you had
been paying €15 in bank charges every
three months, plus €4 a month for a
debit card that expired a year ago. A
payment of €362 had also been taken by
Aviva for medical insurance you
cancelled in 2019. You had also made
several withdrawals in 2020. I queried
the charges with Milleis and Aviva.
Milleis said that payments were still
going into your account in 2020 so you
were still, in effect, using the account
even though you couldn’t access it. The
bank had already returned all charges
for 2021 in the £3,000 transfer.
You asked Aviva, by phone and email,
to cancel your medical insurance in June
2019 but it asked you to send a formal
letter. You, with so much else on your
mind, forgot to do this.
Your medical policy renewed on
September 1, meaning that you could
have incurred charges of €2,644 for a full
year in September 2019. Instead, Aviva
cancelled the monthly direct debits on
September 6, and as it continued to
make payments for medication you had
received until October 20, 2019, it only
charged for the period between
September 1 and October 21 — a sum of
€362. On that basis you are not due a
refund for your medical policy either.
You are relieved to have had the
remaining £3,000 transferred to your
UK account and to have the account
closed at last. It’s just a shame it took
two and a half years to achieve this.I
see that after 30 years
Camelot is to lose its
licence to run the national
lottery. The government
has decided that a lottery
company owned by a Czech
businessman will take it over
from February 2024.
I feel sad for Camelot. The
firm did me a favour, back
when it all began. No, I did
not have a winning ticket, it
just helped me with a project.
The chances of me winning
any money on the lottery are
zero, for the simple reason
that I never buy a ticket. In
fact I have never gambled,
have never smoked, taken
drugs, got drunk, gone out
with wild women. OK, the last
two are fibs, but come on, I
have lived a long life.
Actually, I did buy a ticket
once, on November 19, 1994,
when it started. I wanted one
for my collection of social
history ephemera, and also
because I had just had the
most brilliant idea. When I
read that Camelot was going
to start our first modern
lottery and give billions to
arts, sports, culture, blah
blah, I thought, bugger the
good causes — what about the
winners? How will it affect
their lives? Poor sods. They
don’t know what will hit
them, becoming overnight
millionaires.
I contacted Camelot aboutI met 20 lottery winners
— and money did bring
them happiness
is pretty obvious that money
can ease those problems.
There were winners who
were able to pay for medical
treatment. Those in unhappy
relationships, forced by
poverty to remain together,
could split their win, then go
off and find someone else.
The book was a bestseller,
and serialised in this very
newspaper. Since then, I have
often thought about what I
would not do if I won the
lottery. Here’s my list.
lBuy a flash watch. I just
can’t understand people who
go around with a £20,000
Rolex on their wrists. So sad.
I don’t wear a watch anyway.
I like to get my wrists brown.
( John Lennon had a good
explanation for not wearing a
watch. “I have people on my
staff who can tell the time.”)
lBuy a flash car. Another
total waste of money.
l A bigger house. Gawd no,
my house is too big anyway.
lMore expensive food. I hate
lobster, it has no taste, all
texture. Oysters, yuck. As for
champagne, that’s just fizzy
and tasteless. You can’t beat
toasted cheese and a £5 bottle
of beaujolais from Tesco.
l Paintings. I have a Lowry
drawing, and always wanted
a Lowry painting, such as his
football one, Going to the
Match. But where would I put
it? My walls are crowded.
l Techie stuff. Yes, updating
would be sensible. But the
thought of deciding, being in
when it gets delivered, then
the hell of setting it up? No
thank you.
What would you do if you
won the lottery? Do share at
[email protected].doing a book. I wanted to
meet lottery winners when
they won, then again a year
later, to see how their lives
had changed. After a bit of
faffing Camelot agreed to
help. So for the next year I
had access to 20 winners,
able to observe the dramatic
changes in their lives. Like
most people who queue to
buy a ticket, fantasising about
winning, they each told
themselves, oh, if I win, you
won’t see me for dust, I will
be on a tropical island and I
will give most of the money to
help people, cure cancer,
feed the starving.
In the event, a year later,
not one had moved abroad.
Mostly they moved only
about ten miles, to a slightly
bigger house, but still roughly
in the same area. Only 10 per
cent had given anything to
charity, although they helped
their families enormously.
Were they happier, having
won all this money? There is
a myth that winning a lot of
money, from any source,
does not make you happy. It
is generally accepted folklore,
but really it’s a compensation
myth, to comfort those who
don’t win. A pseudo science
has grown up, especially in
the US, which studies
happiness, creating lots of
indicators, graphs — most of
which is bollocks. I just used
my eyes, endless questions
and the winners’ own
evaluations of their lives. My
conclusion? About 90 per
cent were indeed happier.
Much of modern stress
is caused by not enough
income, not enough food, no
proper accommodation, so itHUNTER
DAVIES