Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE of Permanent TSB has denied that he has any knowledge of any letters being sent to account holders in low amounts of arrears which advised they sell their homes.
Appearing before yesterday’s sitting of the Oireachtas Finance Committee, PTSB CEO Jeremy Masding said he was “not aware” of a family being asked to voluntarily sell a home after falling into arrears of just €300.
The head of asset management at the bank, Shane O’Sullivan said that “there are cases that affordability and sustainability are not there”.
The letters, such as one printed on TheJournal.ie in July have been sent to some account holders said Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty.
Doherty says the family who were sent the letter were told by the bank that the letter was “computer generated” after their account went into arrears for ten days.
“Obviously, I respect the relationship between a customer and their TD,” said Masding, before urging TDs to share such cases with him.
The bank has earlier revealed that 800 of their customers had been involved in assisted voluntary surrender of their homes, while a further 1,200 had been advised that surrender was the bank’s preferred option for them.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
The banks can only be trusted to act in their own self-interest. The banks are broke and need money. People need to have this front and centre when dealing with them.
If selling the house gets the debt paid…. regardless of the size of the debt… then it make sense (to the bank) to recommend it. They are not thinking and don’t care about the hardship or uprooting that would cause.
Their number 1 concern is getting money. Nothing else matters. To think otherwise is madness. People need to safeguard their own interests in whatever way they can. Trusting a broke bank to protect YOUR interests is extreme folly.
Hairy Lemon , right on the nail.
The Banks are grossly insolvent and are in a desperate life and death struggle to survive. By every means possible they are dedicated to that survival. These desperate financial institutions have pump primed well resourced law firms with the latest in technology and trained solicitors to proceed with a massive and unprecedented campaign of mortgage enforcement cases. This legal campaign of terror has the full backing if the Central Bank of Ireland.
The drowning man will pull down anyone or anything that he can latch on to.
The farce of the three day hearings is like examining why a viciously trained dog has attacked someone.
The Banks, ably represented by the IBF, encouraged and supported by the Central Bank of Ireland and with the tacit approval of the Government is about to let leash a vicious campaign of legal terror.
The only defence can be the solidarity of the people.
Whoever attacks my neighbour, attacks me.
We need to adopt the principles and methods of Parnell and Davitt.
The people must resist. If we don’t our society will be truly devastated in a last desperate attempt to give a blood infusion to the expiring Banks.
@Peter – or people could just pay their mortgages? If people don’t pay their mortgages do they have a right to stay in their house, while we in essence pay it for them? If I owe you money do I not have to pay you???
Paul, being €300 behind on payments on a loan that could potentially be up to €300,000 isn’t exactly a panic stations moment. Recommending that the house be sold when the client is only €300 in arrears is laughable really.
The picture is bigger than ‘just pay your mortgage’ The context is a market that was allowed to inflate to the extent that completely unrealistic values were put on property. Now the people who allowed that are trying to kick their victims while they are down. Thousands of lives are utterly ruined because of this. This will echo through the generations. It cannot be overstated that our leaders are morally bound to act. We need an imaginative, complex and radical solution. A few irresponsible bankers in jail would be good too.
Martin, exactly. People who overpaid for their homes have a right to remain in their homes.
Banks more than allowed the inflation, they actively encouraged and drove it up. They leant to builders and buyers.
Add to it that the bank borrowed heavily to fund this splurge and couldn’t pay their own “mortgages”.
The macro factors take up acres of newspaper and Internet forum pages, but this is an individual problem and has to be dealt with on a case by case basis – obviously this was an automatically generated letter – such as being 90 days in arrears – and hopping on this is hopping on a bandwagon.
The whole country would collapse if we were allowed use macro factors not to pay our debts.
Of course the banks have to work with people – but if the mortgage is unsustainable then people have to face the reality. Personally I would be going to a personal insolvency practitioner and using that process to make the debt sustainable – but if the debt is unsustainable then no amount of pointing the fingers at macro factors will fix that.
Fair enough if the same rational is applied to the banks
“Doherty says the family who were sent the letter were told by the bank that the letter was “computer generated” after their account went into arrears for ten days.”
It’s just an automated process that they have in place, of all the things to be pissed off at the banks about, this is just the way they administer their accounts, it’s not a legal letter.
Paul would you pay up for a diamond you purchased that you subsequently found out should have only been valued at 30% of what a so called professional valuer put it at and gave it to you on credit? Added to that your salary slashed to pieces because similar big fish got away with even better deals than ordinary people are after? The nay sayers are clueless. If the State sanctions this type of behaviour then citizens are going to be hit full stop. You cannot preach to the people rightfully seeking justice.
Banks have already been bailed out to cover mortgage defaults one bank (allegedly) even went as far as to use some of that money to fill up their staff pension black hole. I’d not be worried about a few defaulters tbh.
@Cyril – your analogy is flawed as you state that the valuer and the lender are the same entity – this is not what happened. In the mortgage crisis the valuer didn’t give the loan – the Banks never performed a valuation – a valuer with their own professional indemnity policy did the valuation.
By all means go and sue the valuer. I’m surprised that this has not happened – the statute of limitations gives 7 years so if these cases are not brought now, they can never be brought – or at least succeed.
Sorry Paul but this is nonsense (although so is Cyril’s analogy). The ‘Valuer’ in your instance is the estate agent and the seller of the house. They put a value on the house they were selling based on the market conditions at the time. I or someone like me cannot go back and sue the previous house owner and estate agent just because I paid over the odds at the time (If I had have bought during the boom). No one forced a buyer to purchase at the price, they were the market conditions at the time.
Tesco’s are professional valuers and sellers of food. Should I sue them because I bought a tin of beans last week but if I bought them this week I could have gotten 20% off them because they were on sale? No of course not, I paid the price for the beans at the time and market forces dictate that Tescos can sell them cheaper now for whatever reason.
I have to admit a lot of this is over my head. I know if someone got a mortgage on a house 10 or 15 years ago for €300,000 when their income was €80,000 but now that house is worth €150,000 and they have an income of €30,000 – maybe. If those same people went back to their mortgage provider today asking for a €150k mortgage with that income they’d be shown the door so, regardless of the how’s or why’s, things have changed.
I can’t understand why the mortgage companies can’t make deals, take something rather than nothing instead of closing up houses until they rot. It makes no sense, nobody wins.
Another thing from that article, I notice your man Jeremy Masding didn’t say they could ignore those letters.
Lostintallaght to compare a financial noose around peoples neck to the price of food in tesco is the only nonsense here. Im a medical scientist and if I mess up and someone is killed its the hospital that will be sued not me. For obvious reasons employees dont have the money. This happens in every profession except the building trade. Properties that are now 20% of their loaned value is not market forces its negligence and any other profession doing this would be put out of business. In the US this is answered by jingle mail. In Britain by 1 year bankruptcy. The banks builders maybe immune under Irish law I dont know. But its the nay sayers who preach against those who default. Im sorry the banks dont deserve any sympathy and a State that allows this will hurt all its citizens through increased taxes.
It IS market forces Cyril. A house was worth 300k in 2006 because that is what the market demanded. It’s not now and that is because the market has collapsed – the very definition of market forces. Whether you want to believe this or not – and I know a lot of people don’t want to believe it because they’re stuck in an awful situation – it is a fact.
Someone can’t to go and sue a ‘valuer’, in this situation an estate agent, because they paid over the odds on a house back in 2006. Want to know why?
All the estate agent has to do is pull up records of other house sales in the vicinity. ‘Why did I value this house at 300k back in 2006 Your Honor? Because 5 other houses on this street sold at that price just before that. How else would I make a valuation? It’s land – the cost goes up and down based on the market’. Case dismissed.
>>Paul would you pay up for a diamond you purchased that you subsequently found out should have only been valued at 30% of what a so called professional valuer put it at and gave it to you on credit?
The cost of precious stones and precious metals goes up and down all the time! If you took out a loan to buy Eircom shares 3 months before they became worthless would you try and sue the bank that lent you the money and the stockbroker that sold you the shares? Would you refuse to pay the money back to the bank because it wasn’t your fault?
@lostintallaght I dont mean to sound condescending but what you described as a valuers defence is indefensible. What a person is prepared to pay for a property is no indication of a property bubble. It may well be their standard practice. In the 1970s people could eat drink and smoke in a laboratory. They didn’t have to submit to external quality review or didnt have to keep detailed records.
If the lab fails to detect a troponin and someone dies from a heart attack it would not be a defence to say we ran a control on the analyser and it was ok. Audits would determine a million and one possible causes of negligence and if found guilty as in the hepatitis case someones ass would be nailed. Valuers didn’t use gross rent multipliers they didn’t compare international regions controlling for mean income and population etc. These would have flagged up huge warnings. They are in the driving seat. They may well get away with it but then society cant start crying when people default. We get the country we deserve.
The ‘value’ of a house is what someone will pay for it. What someone will pay is determined by the amount of money a bank will loan them. The banks loaned too much, the property prices inflated. The banks are now blaming, accusing and moralising to those who borrowed.
The banks will not, of their own volition, change this attitude. They must be forced by government or by popular revolt. I prefer a legislative and judicial option, but I’m not seeing much political will.
Oh yes you were aware, otherwise you would have said that you were about to start an internal inquiry to get to the bottom of this.
If they are not aware of such matters, they are obviously not in control, remembered what happened last time they weren’t in control, yes we bailed them out and lost our homes that we paid so much for. Umm good answer, not. Take me to your leader.
I agree, Jeremy Masding should spend more time reading computer generated letters, and less time running a company that owes the state 2.6 billion euro.
Bankers are the new mafia. They will lie or steal to try keep their ill gotten profits. When PTSB folds another vulture will pick up the loans at a discounted rate just like KBC did with IIB. Irish law favours this type of predatory activity.
Cyril, precisely.
If only. At least the Mafia have some semblance of an honour code. Something the banks seem to be completely devoid of.
Is this the woman who has been on interest only for years and whose house is worth much more than what she owes the bank?
Your point?
The point is that id she has been paying interest only for years and not capital, if the mortgage no reverts to capital repayments, there is no way she will be able to afford it, as the custome, by her own admission, stated that her income had been devastated.
Of course, I speak for Sandra here, and could ne totally wrong, but please correct me if I am
Paying interest only for years (from when she bought it?) implies she couldn’t afford the house when she bought it. If you are making €40k a year and you qualify to get a mortgage, you have to be able to make your capital + interest mortgage payment every month. So if you opt to pay interest only for years, it means you weren’t too concerned about what happened if things went a bit south. Maybe she was thinking she would earn more money as time goes on and she gets better jobs, but just like the bus drivers’ bonuses, that’s not something you should rely on.
If this is a case of a mortgage holder already on a temporary arrangement with the bank (i.e. Interest only) falling into arrears on even this reduced commitment then it is highly disingenuous of Pearse Doherty to present it as a case of the big bad bank tormenting a normal mortgage holder who has been fully paying their mortgage.
If this lady is falling behind on Interest-only payments then, automated letter or not, the bank is right to suggest that she confront the fact that she cannot afford the house that she is living in.
It is important to remember that this this was a mail merge blanket bombing of distressed borrowers the purpose of which is panic as many vulnerable borrowers as possible to sell their homes under threat of legal proceedings and evictions. It is pure bully boy tactics by a desperate financial institution.
The actions of PTSB have the full and enthusiastic support of the Central Bank of Ireland and the silent but no less determined support of the government of Ireland.
Instead of this State recognising the true victimhood of the unfortunate borrowers who were induced into over borrowing to buy grossly over inflated value homes, the Government and the Central Bank of Ireland are actively complicit with the Irish regulated Banks in seeking to minimise the expense of the looming second bank bail out by cynically destroying the home ownership of the unfortunate victims of a housing scam and associated mortgage scandal.
As a nation, we have a duty to protect our neighbours. This is a time for the people to unite. My neighbours are entitled to remain in their homes. The are the victims. They do not deserve to be further victimised.
I oppose the eviction of the people who are unemployed through no fault of their own, who don’t have the incomes to afford to repay grossly excessive mortgages on over priced homes. Most of the people affected live in modest homes and are not residing in multi million Euro trophy homes. Most of the victims, the vast majority are not strategic defaulters; they simply cannot afford the excessive repayments.
Leave the victims alone. Leave the victims in their homes. Do not let the banks in their desperate struggle to survive consume the economy and inflict massive damage on society.
Let the majority of the Irish regulated Banks fail. Keep one. Then let the Administrators of the already insolvent banks sell their mortgage loan books at a discount and the buyers will then do sensible write downs.
Do not waste more tax payers funds in bailing out hopelessly insolvent banks. Let the, fail as a consequence of their grossly reckless lending policies. Let those who worship the free market and pure capitalism see that a financial institution too stupid and to greedy to mange its solvency be properly punished by natural business failure.
Strengthen and reinforcing the sole surviving Bank. Expand that Bank. Convert the best of a very bad lot into a good bank as a monopoly provider of retail banking services and let the rest fail. There is only capacity to rescue and to preserve one bank.
The strategy from the start should not have been to attempt to save thee tire Irish banking system. Just save the least bad of the bad banks and then deal with the consequences of failure.
Is one bank monopolising services a good idea?
PTSB can absolutely, thoroughly, utterly and completely copulate themselves.
If this womans house is worth much more than the mortage owing she should sell up and downsize for heavens sake. My sympathy lies with people in negative equity who need a restructure. Not someone who is paying interest only and sitting living in the solution. Sell it off clear your debts, no brainer.
The banks dont give a f*** about anyone, all they are there to do is make profit off of completely unfair interest rates and loans.the people who control the IMF and the federal reserve are the ones who are in charge, they can decide if we are in ‘recession’ or not, which is all through generating fear in the media and what not, these are the same people who tell lies to go to war. Its sad really because people dont give a sh*t anymore once they hav their MTV and the kardashians. there has to be some sort of global revolution to weed out minority who control the majority.
PtSB are a pack of wank@r obviously.
Urge TDs to share stories. A quick phone call to the arrears unit will tell you what you need to know. The head of this unit may also have a problem with quality of information being reported.
Back to basics indeed
I got a letter from them mid summer re an unauthorised overdraft on a current account. Told me to contact them to arrange a suitable repayment schedule. Even advised me to contact MABS. Overdraft amount? €0.35cent. I actually considered ringing them to see what payment plan they’d suggest!
have your say