AIB Appeals committee- where does this leave them?

[October2019]

Firstly, I would like to thank everyone involved in this campaign, especially to Brendan, Karen and Alan and all the committee members. It is very easy for people to comment on an issue but without these people rolling their sleeves up and saying- 'no this isn't right and we don't care who you are or how big you are when you are wrong we are going to hold you to account' none of this would have happened.

Secondly, having seen that AIB has accepted the ombudsman's decision, my thoughts are bringing me back to the appeals panel. I remember something that happened at one of the Oireachtas committee meetings. AIB were asked how many appeals were processed and I think the answer, at that time, was 100. They were then asked how many successful appeals they had out of that 100 and it was 1!! Now we have to assume that the committee members were to some extent independent, so the question arises how come they didn't agree with the customers more than 1% of the time?

My own opinion is that they were restricted by AIB in some way, maybe by saying something like you have to accept that the Interest rate, had they been on a tracker would have been 12% so they needed to take that nonsense figure into their findings. Any reasonable person could see that there was some issue here and for them to arbitrarily decline so many cases is strange to say the least. So I suppose my point is was this an absolute farce from the start and do the Independent members of the appeals panel have some questions to answer?

 

[Brendan Burgess]

Hi October

I don't think that the Appeals Panel did their job properly.

They sent the same "cut and paste" two page reject notice to everyone, irrespective of the arguments put forward.

Compare that with the Ombudsman's decision. It is 33 pages long. He went through the arguments we put forward. He went through AIB's counter arguments. He raised some issues which we had not raised. (Maybe other borrowers had raised them.) He agreed with some of our points and explained why. He rejected others. He acknowledged that he found it difficult to arrive at an appropriate level of redress.

But I have no doubt that the Ombudsman's office gave this detailed and lengthy consideration. I would not be surprised if he got counsel's opinion.

While I am disappointed that he did not agree 100% with our case and that he did not direct AIB to put Karen on a tracker of 1.5% for the rest of her mortgage, I know that he arrived at that decision after careful consideration.

I would have been gutted if he had rejected our complaint outright. But even then, I would have had to acknowledge that he had only done so after treating it seriously.

The Appeals Panel did not treat the appeals on this issue seriously. They arrived at a decision on the principle very quickly and then issued the cut and paste job after that.

I don't think that they had their cards marked by AIB as you suggest. But they probably did discuss it with AIB and they did not discuss it with any consumer representatives.

Brendan