Thank you for your replies, and to you too Maria for your post.
Actually we didn’t use the services of a lawyer when purchasing the house, so the mortgage contract was never reviewed externally. The quotes we received from the lawyers we contacted were fairly extortionate in comparison with the price of the property. Most were around 4-5% of the price (i.e. quite a bit more than the illegal mortgage fees), and my experience of lawyers here in Spain has been somewhat of an “eye-opener”. I’ve unfortunately had the pleasure of experiencing lawyers openly recommending high-risk, illegal tax avoidance schemes, not turning up to pre-arranged meetings (or turning up very late), and blaming clients for their mistakes etc.
Now, before anyone jumps in and says “well, if you take that kind of risk by not hiring professionals, you get what you deserve”, we didn’t purchase the property blindly or naively. We had a full independent survey of the property carried out (something a lawyer will also do, but charge several times the price). We checked that the building had all it’s licences, had no debts and checked that everything appeared correctly on the catastro (and that it matched what was in the escritura). In addition, we also knew the previous owners, and several other people living on the urbanisation. So all things considered, in our opinion anyway, it was low risk (at least as far as property purchases in Spain go). Also, we had factored in the fact that there might be unexpected expenses that we might have to cover (such as these fees).
It’s very frustrating that there doesn’t seem to be a consistent legal precedent that cover exactly what fees can be claimed (it sounds like different regions/courts have interpreted this ruling differently), and it’s infuriating that the banks are still using the fact that the system is fundamentally broken to pass on their financial responsibilities to their clients.