Mr. Padraic Kissane:

The PTSB's definition of a tracker mortgage was set out on the back of every single page of its loan offers. It stated that margin will not be exceeded during the term of the loan. It might seem astonishing news but the term of the loan began when it was drawn down, not at the expiry of the fixed rate. Therefore, what was the tracker rate? What is astonishing is that, if we take the example of the one that is the furthest along the lines of the challenge on the margin issue, I have cases in my office with no margin. What the banks representatives claimed here in this committee room was they had two tracker products, they had the stated margin product and the non-stated margin product in 2016. In 2006, 2007 and 2008 when they were doing this, the reason margins were withdrawn was related to the retention of business. The margin could be improved but it could not be increased.

If one had a loan-to-value ratio of 90% at the outset and at the end one's three years one's loan-to-value ratio might have improved to 60% at the rate valuations were going, it allowed the bank improve the margin so that it did not lose the customer to another lender. I have in my possession documentation I have called, "The PTSB puzzle". It is four loan offers, all with similar loans. No margin is stated in any of loan offers. I have four margins: 0.8, 1.1, 3.25 and 3.25. The game, I challenge anybody to, is to assign the margins to the correct loan offers. These are four cases in redress. They are telling me I am wrong on the 3.25 one and it is identical in one case to the 0.8 margin. Before I brought it up, I telephoned the Central Bank and stated I needed to be certain that the customer with 0.8 will not be caught with another systems error.