Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 January 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Tracker Mortgages: Allied Irish Banks

4:00 pm

Mr. Bernard Byrne:

The question I answered was in respect of how the matter started, so I answered the question on 2008. In the opening statement we talked about the period after that. We identified and recognised that complaints came in. We have said that there was a very small number of complaints, and they were. In the scheme of where the organisation was and where things were, there was a tiny number of complaints. A number of those complaints were made and passed on through the ombudsman, and the ombudsman did find in favour of the bank in terms of its position. At that point in time, people understood the position that the bank was adopting and, principally, these were around rate-type issues, and that actually there was a reasonable position that the bank was adopting in respect of that offering.

It was only later on, and the period that we are talking about now is into the 2015 period, when the prevailing rate issue started to emerge more in the ombudsman-type issue. Broader issues were taking place across the industry at that point in time. We identified a particular group in respect of an EBS offering, which we have not talked about. It is a price promise offering, which also sat on a 3,500 group that Mr. Kinsella has talked about. All of those issue came and we said that we need to look at this because there is enough indication now that there is a problem. That was when, in August 2015, we started the programme around looking at the whole tracker issue, and started to step up our position on that.

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