How many times have you paid a fee for something you never asked for - maintaining a dormant account, checking your balance at an ATM, or some „service" you only find out about when it's deducted from your account? LDP leader and MP Monika Zajkova is calling for an urgent law to stop what she describes as the banks „fleecing" their customers.

„When the state sees that fees keep rising and that banks are ‘fleecing' people with unnecessary charges, let them run an analysis", Zajkova said. „It makes no sense to pay for keeping a dormant account, or for checking your balance at an ATM." Her point is simple - in other European countries this is regulated by law, so why not here.

LDP's proposal to cut bank fees was recently rejected by the ruling majority in parliament. Zajkova warns that a possible 30 percent increase in fees would hit pensioners and steady, creditworthy citizens hardest - exactly the people least able to defend themselves.

She goes a step further with a question that's rarely said out loud: why does the government side with the banks so easily? Zajkova suggests the answer may lie in the loans banks extend to political parties, or in the way political players are financed - something, she says, that deserves an explanation.

The central bank governor has also called for lower fees, which means the problem isn't the invention of one opposition party. The question left for the ordinary citizen is bitterly familiar: when both the regulator and the opposition say the banks are overdoing it, who exactly is the government protecting - the citizen paying a fee on their own money, or the bank collecting it?