Article: Ulster Bank admits selling mortgages to vultures where homeowners wrongly lost tracker rates

[Paul F]

Ulster Bank admits selling mortgages to vultures where homeowners wrongly lost tracker rates

ULSTER Bank has admitted it sold a number of mortgage accounts where homeowners had trackers wrongly taken off them to vulture funds.

www.independent.ie

ULSTER Bank has admitted it sold a number of mortgage accounts where homeowners had trackers wrongly taken off them to vulture funds.

The mortgages were regarded as non-performing.

But Sinn Féin finance spokesman Pearse Doherty said it is unlikely these mortgage holders would have ended up in arrears if they had not been denied their rights to keep their low-priced trackers.

Apologies if this has been covered before. Is this new information or has this cohort been fully compensated for UB's actions? I.e., even if they were compensated for losing their tracker, have they been compensated for the fact that they are on high rates with vulture funds that probably (might?) would not have bought these mortgages if they had never wrongly lost their tracker?

 

[SaySomething]

Hi Paul,

As part of the redress and compensation scheme, customers who had a tracker withheld were returned to the position they should have been in if they had never lost it.

So really the question is the level of compensation they received.

There was a separate tier of compensation for people who lost their homes but the standard level of compensation applied to most customers with everybody free to appeal to the Ulster Bank Appeals panel and/or the Ombudsman.

There's no way of telling whether or not customers have been fully compensated or not. Each customers' experience is different. The fact that the onus is put on the customer to chase further compensation means that it's likely most didn't.

My experiences with the Appeals Panel as a customer who was in arrears while being charged the incorrect interest rate were interesting. My mortgage was not passed on to a vulture fund. However, there was a paternalistic view expressed by panel members that I should be grateful to be back on the correct rate and that at least on paper my mortgage was restored to the way it should have been. So effectively what was my problem and why was I complaining further.

 

[Paul F]

My experiences with the Appeals Panel as a customer who was in arrears while being charged the incorrect interest rate were interesting. My mortgage was not passed on to a vulture fund. However, there was a paternalistic view expressed by panel members that I should be grateful to be back on the correct rate and that at least on paper my mortgage was restored to the way it should have been. So effectively what was my problem and why was I complaining further.

That sounds dreadful.

As part of the redress and compensation scheme, customers who had a tracker withheld were returned to the position they should have been in if they had never lost it.

Does that mean that people who wrongly lost their tracker and had their mortgage sold to a vulture fund have had the mortgage moved back to their original lender (and had it converted back to a tracker)?

Or were the borrowers referred to in the article (and borrowers like them who were with other lenders) put on trackers while being left with the vulture funds?

Or have they slipped through the cracks of the redress scheme?

 

[SaySomething]

Does that mean that people who wrongly lost their tracker and had their mortgage sold to a vulture fund have had the mortgage moved back to their original lender (and had it converted back to a tracker)?

Or were the borrowers referred to in the article (and borrowers like them who were with other lenders) put on trackers while being left with the vulture funds?

Or have they slipped through the cracks of the redress scheme?

This complaint, which was partially upheld by the Ombudsman's Office in 2022, gives you an idea of what happened for customers in the circumstances you've referenced:

https://www.fspo.ie/complaint-outcomes/decisions/documents/2022-0042.pdf

Obviously the Omdbudsman does not reference a particular lender but you get the idea. Go to pages 39 & 40 for the steps the bank had to take to rectify things.