Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. The tracker mortgage examination has taken up a large part of this committee's work in previous years. Unfortunately, we have not concluded with it. These are statements I would have made to the Central Bank when it issued its final report in July 2019. I know the Chairman was also very vocal in saying that there were outstanding cases. When the Central Bank closed off on the tracker mortgage examination in July 2019, its final report outlined that 40,100 customers were affected with €683 million paid out by lenders. A total of 99 family homes and 216 buy-to-let units were lost. A number of months roll on and what happens? AIB had to pay out millions of euro to 5,900 other victims when it had to announce in April that it also denied these individuals tracker mortgages, following a single case taken to the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman which upheld the finding.

We talk about cohorts of people in different types of contracts. Nearly 6,000 people in this type of contract were missed by the Central Bank. Claims that were being made went through the independent process with AIB and were refused. The Central Bank oversaw that and signed off a final report stating that it was done and dusted, although it was going to continue to monitor the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman. That does not absolve it from its responsibilities, in terms of the consumer protection role that the Oireachtas has given the Central Bank. In the middle of such a serious examination how could it miss that nearly 6,000 customers were also denied and wrongly impacted by AIB over their tracker mortgages?

If that were not good enough, three months later, in July last, AIB announced that there were another 1,000 victims of the tracker mortgage scandal, again as a result of an examination following a complaint to the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman. Each of those affected through EBS and Haven, which are subsidiaries of AIB, were paid approximately €6,000. The earlier group of 6,000 victims were offered €1,650. We discussed this at the previous committee. Members of the previous committee said that these people were entitled to a tracker mortgage and the €1,650 did not deal with the issue. I am baffled that the Central Bank continued to miss this, despite warnings from me and other committee members and from advocates arguing for it.

How did the Central Bank miss seeing that one bank had more than 7,000 additional victims of the tracker mortgage scandal, which the Central Bank, when it signed off on the report in July 2019, believed did not exist?