WE’RE HEADING FOR A PERFECT VULTURE STORM
Warning 1,000s may lose homes
IRELAND faces a “perfect vulture storm” as thousands of people are thrown out of their homes by heartless investors, the Government has been warned.
David Hall, head of the Irish Mortgage Holders Association, said the situation was at a dangerous and unprecedented level.
He spoke after it was revealed that Permanent TSB and Ulster Bank plan to sell 25,000 mortgages to vulture funds.
To make matters worse, the European Central Bank has signalled split mortgages designed to help borrowers make repayments are being classed as “non-performing”.
Mr Hall said: “This is the perfect vulture storm and it isn’t pretty and it has rehashed.
“It’s like re-abusing people, people who are in difficulty, who engaged and spilt their financial guts, who split their medical guts, who did everything right, who did all they were asked to do, signed the contract and made repayments are now up for sale.” Across all of the banks there are 28,000 mortgage holders who have splitarrangements with financial institutions, who have been engaging with banks and making repayments and are now left wondering if their loans could be snapped up by ruthless vultures. Mr Hall said:“if the ECB has determined that split mortgages are nonperforming and require PTSB to sell them, well then there’s 27,000 mortgages among all the banks, well then what happens then?”
Mr Hall stressed the circumstances facing mortgage holders who have their loans snapped up by vultures.
You have a bunch of narratives saying vultures will write down debt, vultures have no structure, they have zero restructuring arrangement that writes down debt apart from losing your home. “Zero. Not one of them modifies your loan and reduces your repayments to resize your loan, none of them. The only time they do it is in an insolvency arrangement when the courts are forcing them to do it.
“So yes they’ll write down your debt but you lose your home, but they don’t do long-term restructuring.” Yesterday, the Sunday Business Post reported efforts by Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have failed to find a resolution to the crisis.
Mr Hall believes the only solution is to set up a Nama-type body for mortgage holders.
He added: “We’re not talking about giving people free houses and we’re not saying there should be no repossessions either for a number of messers either.”