Sir, – Conor Pope gave us an excellent Pricewatch feature on November 13th ("Customer satisfaction: where to turn when things go wrong"). It was journalism at its best – he asked the right questions and set out the answers he received, most of which were pretty feeble, and none feebler than that of the Central Bank.
In relation to the tracker scandal, the bank maintains that its tracker examination is “the largest and most complex . . . . undertaken to date”. Perhaps there’s some underlying mystery about the process but it seems fairly straightforward to me.
At each bank some person, or persons, decided it would be a cracker of an idea to switch people from the tracker mortgages to which they were entitled and put them on much higher variable rates.
Instructions must have been handed down to the relevant staff detailing the rate changes to be made and the customer categories to which they should be applied. The changes didn’t happen in a vacuum, so there should be evidence of these instructions – assuming the evidence hasn’t been destroyed (bankers wouldn’t do that now, would they?).
All the Central Bank has to do is to identify these managers and bring them to book. The bank has the powers, but what it lacks is the will. It has a poor grasp of actions and their consequences.
And we have to ask again: where were the bank directors in all this – particularly the supposedly “public interest” directors? Any chance we could hear from them?– Yours, etc,
BILL POWER,
Tramore, Co Waterford.