Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The point is that we now have a clear interpretation of the legislation that shows that the words and assurances that were given by the Central Bank are not true. It is not just about a judgment by the FSPO, and I am sure Ms Rowland will deal with that. The key issue is that credit servicing firms were regulated under the 2015 Act. However, the definition of a credit servicing firm – the Central Bank engaged in that legislation – excludes key decision-making. The FSPO has determined that key decision-making is material decisions in relation to the sale of your assets and the assessment of the standard financial statement. Therefore, they are unregulated. The owner of the loan is unregulated and therefore, the FSPO cannot make a determination with regard to those decisions. The owners of the loan only became regulated after the 2019 Act on which they had three months to seek regulation. Many of them, in the first quarter of 2019, were still unregulated. Therefore, the FSPO has no reach for conduct that happened between those years. There is a separate matter I will come to later on but this affects tens of thousands of people who potentially had decisions made in respect of their loans who cannot complain to the FSPO anymore. That flies in the face of all of the assurances that were given by the Central Bank before Mr. Makhlouf’s time, by the Ministers and by taoisigh. They sold a pup by supporting the sale of the loans.

I stood so hard against this. The Central Bank had its own guidelines that it should not even happen but all of that was allowed to be ignored and all the rest. I refer to the statutory guidelines, which were deleted from the Internet afterwards. They were there for two decades but they just got rid of them. The guidelines stated that loans should not be sold without the consent of the loan owner. These loans should never have been in the hands of the vulture funds. To add injury to insult, now that they are in the hands of the vulture funds, their interest rates are going up and there is only a short-term focus with regard to their family homes in many cases and many of them cannot even complain to the financial services ombudsman about this. What option to they have? Do they go to court and spend thousands of euro on legal fees and barristers? The mechanism that exists in every member state is a free independent arbiter with regard to financial services, which people are now locked out of because of a Government decision, supported by the Central Bank, to sell tens of thousands of loans to vulture funds.