Longford Leader columnist Mattie Fox: Heartbreaking stories behind the numbers in Ombudman's findings

Two people were overcharged up to €1,131 per month when their bank wrongly refused to give them access to a tracker mortgage, a ruling from the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman (FSPO) found, in a report published last week.

This story didn’t receive much high profile media coverage, maybe because it referred to ordinary people....The Times and RTE covered it, and must be acknowledged for doing so. Many people might say what has this to do with the Longford readers, but of course this is what the banks don’t want highlighted, although legally it is beyond their lawyers, once published, and deserves to be printed.

Everyone, who deals with a bank, should know these things, and act upon them. View banks with the caution merited.
I know there are numerous other cases still winding their way through the courts. In one case, the bank offered €6,265 as compensation, perhaps thinking that the couple, who had been the subject of this ongoing terrible, stressful treatment, would accept and be glad it was all over, so to speak. However, the FSPO found that the total the couple were overcharged came to almost €64,000 between 2009 and 2015. €64,000!!

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The interest that the couple were overcharged because of the higher mortgage varied from one month to the next, the FSPO found. Overall, it averaged at around €1,000 every month. An example of this was cited which included the overcharging of €1,131 in October 2014 and March 2015, while the bank wrongly refused to provide them with a tracker mortgage.

The FSPO gave numerous examples of the precise amount overcharged on the mortgage payments of the couple after the bank refused to put them back onto a lower tracker rate to which they were entitled. Neither the couple or the bank were named in the FSPO decision.

The regulator said the couple had agreed to a 34-year mortgage with monthly repayments of €1,554 per month. However, the FSPO found that the banks proposal of compensation was “not at all reasonable” due to the “significance of the overcharge, and the considerable stress that it caused”. The Ombudsman directed that the lender pay the couple an additional €45,000 in compensation.

In several cases, Ireland’s banks moved people off their tracker rates knowingly, incorrectly. This couple, were one of the many who found themselves caught up in legal stress, during the tracker mortgage scandal, which in more than 40,000 customer accounts were affected after banks moved in 2008 to stop offering cheap mortgages linked to the European Central Banks (ECB) main rate.

This caused such huge financial hardship to the banks customers, and resulted in at least 99 losing their homes.
Yet, the banks still broadcast warm advertisements.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if this is another scandalous set of circumstances, or not. I wonder how have the couple at the heart of this matter feel having gone through years or hell, caused by the bank.

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