Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome that firms cannot use as a defence the claim that they were ordered to breach the regulations but we are back to my first question about the unregulated owner. If it is unregulated, it is outside the ambit of the Financial Regulator. How will the regulator know whether the unregulated entity is behaving properly? We have had a lengthy debate on providing transparency on transactions so that when an individual's loan is sold on he or she is entitled to know who owns it. The Minister for Finance's opinion was that if somebody owes money on a mortgage, it simply has to be repaid and there is no benefit in knowing the identity of the creditor. We might not easily know who was behind a company which purchased a portfolio of mortgages. We will have a problem with establishing the identity of the new owner, which will therefore be both unknown and unregulated. People should know who owns their mortgages. The legislation will bring some improvements in this regard but we have argued all along that the owners of the loans should also be regulated.