John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I disagree with what PTSB is doing. I believe it has not worked sufficiently hard to resolve these issues. We all accept the reality that the bank or any other institution will always have a hardcore of cases that it cannot deal with. Again, the evidence that I have received, as Chairman of this committee, clearly indicates that PTSB has not engaged in the way that I had expected it to do.

I shall briefly refer to a few things that the CEO mentioned in his opening statement because I do not want the information to leave this meeting as if it were fact. He said, "We established a best-in-class infrastructure with up to 300 people working to manage the arrears challenge." There is no evidence of that in the letters we have received from PTSB customers.

I have dealt with the SSM matter. PTSB is wrong not to include the loans until it has a very clear definition of the position. I hope that the bank will analyse its entire portfolio to determine how many loans can be removed from the sale and not sold.

I presume PTSB wants to reassure people as Mr. Masding continued:

Since our announcement much of the commentary has focussed on customer protection when their loans are sold. But the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland has confirmed in recent weeks that, where a loan is sold, the protections “travel with the loan” and that “borrowers are protected in accordance with the consumer protection framework”.

That is a general comment. I can attest that, in practice, that does not happen. The vulture funds and their agents are unregulated and do not appear before this committee. The attitude of the agents, who act on behalf of a vulture fund, is despicable. In fact, they should not be in business at all by virtue of the way that they have treated people. As I have said before, any civilised society would not tolerate what is going on in the context of vulture funds. Lest any member of the public is misled by this statement, I can confirm that the opposite is true. Most people who have gone through the unsavoury experience of dealing with a vulture fund have been left deeply unhappy and traumatised. I wanted to make it clear to the people who are about to be thrown to the vulture funds that the experience is deeply unpleasant.

I shall refer to the figures mentioned and the general approach adopted to tackle the tracker issue. I would like a simple breakdown of all of the numbers. How many people are in arrears due to the tracker issue? How many people are deemed to be part of the sell-out because of the tracker issue?

Split mortgages have been mentioned. How many of the split mortgages are 50:50?