New campaign to use EU law to challenge vulture funds

Brendan Burgess said:
Absolutely. The Irish courts have been quite clear that irresponsible lending is not a defence for people.

But I presume that their argument would be that EU law would trump that.
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But to date no Irish Court has applied the EU Fair Terms Directive to favour a consumer despite the EU Directive being transposed into Irish Law with SI 27 1995 .
The FSPO has not taken this view either to the best of my knowledge .
Going by the info they have provided a consumer would be waiting 10 to 15 years to get a result and millions would be clocked up in fees and who is actually footing the bill for that ?
 
Raging Bull said:
L Im not sure how it works if they are charging nothing they must be on a %of any payout.
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They have said somewhere that this is the case.
Raging Bull said:
However AFAIK a Solicitor can not charge on that basis but I stand to be corrected
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They can. Solicitors can't advertise "no win no fee" charging but only for personal injury cases. But in this case it's ok as far as I know. I doubt that any solicitor would make a basic mistake in this regard.
 
ClubMan said:
They did in the case that I mentioned helping to bring. They rejected my argument based on the EU "fair contract wording" law/detective. This was about 10 years ago.
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I might have phrased that wrong , FSPO has not ruled in a consumers favour re Unfair Terms to the best of my knowledge , like you we had a complaint and FSPO ruled contrary to the terms as he didnt understand how to apply the actual workings of the product concerned.
 
Can't work out who actually could be successful
  • Interest-only mortgages These were usually buy to lets. Very few, if any, were primary family homes.
  • Self-certification mortgages This could open a can of worms. Did the customer knowingly make a false declaration?
  • Mortgages beyond retirement age: Don't think there were any back them. Even KBC only went above 60 on special application
  • Re-mortgages to consolidate debt: Another difficult one to prove, but possibly the only cohort that might benefit IF you can show it was blatantly mis-sold to the disadvantage of the customer.

Widespread use of the word "vulture" and dangling a potential compensation of €200,000+ really plays to a certain type of person. Looking at those they say they can represent, its a tiny tiny number of people and the potential of any to be successful is probably near zero.
 
I would say there is 0% chance of success honestly.

I would say they would have a lot more success if they look at restructures put on accounts over the years. Over the years I have read alot of arrangements put on accounts by all the pillar banks that are extreme but probably necessary.

Very few PDH loans were interest only but after 2010, hundreds if not thousands were converted to interest only loans to keep the borrowers in their home. I'd say a lot of borrowers only saw that they keep their house and payments came down and were happy. Some of these arrangements are over a decade old and a lot of them forgot that at the end of their term there is going to be a huge balance outstanding at the end.

Still might be hard to argue, as the borrower were made aware of any shortfall and the banks other choice would of been legal action.
 
Bank of Scotland did 90% interest-only mortgages.
ptsb did some as well.

Were they mis-sold? I don't think so. The people who took out the money knew what they were doing. Some got on the housing ladder who would not have otherwise got on the housing ladder.

Nothing wrong with a mortgage beyond retirement age. Sure aren't Spry authorised to give mortgages to people who are aged over 60?

Not sure what is wrong with self-certification? And how much was there? I don't think I could rock up to a lender and say my income was €100k as a self-employed taxi driver. I think that they did do some checking of this. But what is my complaint now? That my income was only €20,000 and that it was their fault for allowing me lie to them?

Were there many mortgages to consolidate debt? I know that the sub-prime lenders did them. But did the main banks do them? There may have been switches and the borrower consolidated their car loan of €20k but at 4% instead of 10%. Was that irresponsible lending?
 
Brendan Burgess said:
I think that the main legal vulnerability for the VFs is the rate that they are charging.

I doubt that they or the banks would be got for irresponsible lending.
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The rates are an issue but I'm not sure how you address it without passing a law saying the non bank entities must use a market average for rates. You cant link them to the past banks as some banks where the loans came from do not exist anymore.

Also some banks that loans were sold had horrible rates. I work on loans sold by Springboard and they had 9% rates back in 2018 before rates were going up in Ireland. The rates were high but they were high when they were sold.
 
In relation to the mortgage beyond retirement age, hard to take a serious stance on that when there are many PIAs pushing mortgages out to the borrowers 90th plus birthday. If that's an issue then the PIA world needs to be reviewed.
 

1) By requiring funds to make available the rates on offer by the bank who sold the mortgage, you solve the problem for most customers. Most of the non-trackers were sold by AIB, BoI, EBS and ptsb.
2) BoSI and Danske are no longer around, but they mainly sold Trackers so no intervention is necessary.
3) There will be some customers who are not protected by this measure - but it's better to protect 90% of those affected than to protect none of them.
4) Springboard was a sub-prime lender. So their customers knew when they took out the mortgage that they would be charged a much higher rate.
 
AshKhan said:
In relation to the mortgage beyond retirement age, hard to take a serious stance on that when there are many PIAs pushing mortgages out to the borrowers 90th plus birthday. If that's an issue then the PIA world needs to be reviewed.
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It is much better to push a mortgage out to age 90 than to push the borrower out onto the street because it's otherwise unsustainable.
 
Your point is well made and the difficulty is that some seem to think this is a silver bullet to cure all
 
Brendan Burgess said:
I think that the main legal vulnerability for the VFs is the rate that they are charging.

I doubt that they or the banks would be got for irresponsible lending.
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Ben Hoey says that reckless lending is OK.

x.com

x.com
Although this seems a bit contradictory?

Mis-selling – Mis-sold Mortgages Ireland

Mis-sold Mortgages Ireland
misselling.ie
In its simplest form, financial mis-selling means recklessly misrepresenting a financial services product or service in order to successfully complete a sale.
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I don't see it as contradictory.

He defines reckless lending as being reckless for the lender.

Reckless selling is different.

For example, an investment company could recklessly sell you an investment product at no risk to themselves.

Brendan
 
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