Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I know the Minister and the Central Bank want to move on from this scandal and the banks are talking about returning to normality, restoring bonuses and so on. This case relates to a couple who submitted an appeal in June 2018. There has been correspondence back and forth between them and the BDO Ireland secretariat, which oversees the independent appeals process for Ulster Bank. BDO requested some additional information from this family relating to their mortgage account. This concerned the family because the request indicated that BDO either had not read the mortgage account file or did not have a copy of it. Two weeks ago, the couple posed the question of whether BDO was capable of adjudicating on the appeal fairly and stated they had lost faith in the appeals process. The appeals board finally came back to them and confirmed that, as an independent secretariat, it only has access to the mortgage account details provided to it. In the case of Ulster Bank, this means BDO only has the compensation letter. It does not have the mortgage file or any other documentation. This raises serious questions about the whole point of the independent appeals process within Ulster Bank and possibly other banks. The latest information available to me indicates that Ulster Bank has identified 3,490 customers who were impacted by this scandal, 472 appeals packs have been dispatched, 81 have resubmitted and 20 appeals have been heard, only one quarter of which have been upheld.

The Minister must take action on this. He needs to ensure that Ulster Bank is providing all the detail to the independent appeals process because it is a complete sham if the only thing the appeals process has is the compensation letter and it must adjudicate based on that.

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