Mr. Stephen Groarke:

The belief in the bank at the time, which was wrong in the absence of providing the right warnings to the customer, was that we had to fulfil the contract. Due to the fact that the customer had not reached the expiry of a fixed rate period, he or she was not entitled to a tracker because he or she had broken early. That was the nature of the appeal to the Financial Services Ombudsman and the High Court until the appeal was withdrawn by more recent management. The systems error was the absence of having the right controls in place to warn customers initially of the potential for the tracker rate to become more attractive than the variable rate and not to recheck the view of the contract right up to the point where it was being appealed in the courts.