QuickQuid, Britain’s biggest payday lender, has gone into administration after talks with the UK Financial Conduct Authority fell through. CashEuroNet UK, the US-owned lender that comprises QuickQuid, On Stride Financial and Pounds to Pocket, announced that all three of its UK-based ‘brands’ had gone into administration as of 25 October.
According to its website, whilst the company has gone bust and is unlikely to cough up the millions it owes, the lawyers are making it explicitly clear that all borrowers must continue to pay off their debts to the company:
“All outstanding loans remain subject to the terms agreed with the company and borrowers should continue to make payments in the usual way according to the company’s terms and conditions.” (Enova International, Inc, October 2019)
Talk about having your cake and eating it …
Why has QuickQuid gone bust?
QuickQuid received more than ten thousand complaints and legal challenges in recent months as a result of having mis-sold loans to those who can’t afford to service them. The interest rates on these loans are typically as high as 1,575 percent.
When talks with the FCA aimed at resolving the mass of complaints broke down, CashEuroNet UK pulled the plug. Presumably its US owners felt it would be better to up and run with the quick quids they had made than to stay and potentially have to answer to or even pay back those they had taken advantage of at a time of austerity, poverty, deprivation and record levels of unemployment in Britain.
What does this mean for working people?
The double standards and rank hypocrisy of capitalism in Britain couldn’t be clearer: punishment for the poor and reward for the rich is the message.
Borrowers who have been mis-sold crippling loans aren’t guaranteed compensation, but QuickQuids owners are free to sell off their assets and leave, pocketing the pretty penny they have extorted from hardworking people – a quick quid indeed for parent company CashEuroNet UK.
What should workers do?
If you live and work in Britain, you are a British worker, no matter where in the world you are from. We believe that the only thing workers can do is to organise themselves, get educated and retaliate in order to protect themselves and their families from austerity, oppression and all other problems put onto us by the wealthy class and the bankers.
This is one of the essential reasons workers in Britain have come together and formed our own organisation. One single fact strikes out clear as day: whenever there is trouble in the economy, it is the workers that pay the price for the greed of the wealthy and the political class in Britain.
Whenever there’s a debt to be paid, the ruling class and their bourgeois state expect the workers to foot the bill.
