Ms Derville Rowland:

The Governor has described it as it is. Deputy McGrath asked in particular about the AIB case. AIB will be in a better position to tell the Deputy more than I can from its point of view, but there was contractual right to have a tracker offered and that did not in fact happen. We call that a breach of contract. The compensatory payment is for that. Then a second question arises, which is the actual tracker rate. It may be said that some contracts are watertight on these issues because they actually have in print in the contract what that rate is to be and then it is beyond discussion or dispute. They are often called a price promise tracker, where one has a number in the contract document and there is very little argument about those types of contracts. When one has a phrase such as "the then prevailing rate" in a contract, there is a question of interpretation from different points of view. Whether one agrees or not, there is a question of interpretation about what that means. In this instance, not all contracts are as watertight as other contracts but it is very important for customers who are included in the scheme. By being included in the scheme, it means that all the benefits of the framework are available to be used in the scheme.

There may be individual circumstances or information people have had in their own sales experience that may not exactly be systemic or it may be peculiar to their own experience when they are entering into the contract that they can bring forward to the appeals mechanism. In fact, the framework was designed precisely to deal with issues where people may have particular information that they can bring forward. That certainly is the case here. These are inside the benefit of the framework and they can bring forward any information that they wish to about that prevailing rate issue if they have extra information.