Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 January 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Tracker Mortgages: Allied Irish Banks

4:00 pm

Mr. Bernard Byrne:

Yes. This is the conversation that has been well rehearsed at this point in time. The position we have, which is the one the Central Bank talked about, is that the prevailing tracker rate would have been at a prohibitively expensive rate and therefore the customer was not denied an attractive commercial offer at that point in time. Therefore, the compensation is to do with the failure to deliver the contractual offer, not that there was a financial loss associated with not being offered that product. It is a very different position than somebody who had an existing tracker margin and was able to go back to it.