£25m aid for Presbyterian fund unlikely to be repaid

AROUND £25m of public moneyusedtohelpbailoutsaversin the Presbyterian Mutual Society is unlikely ever to be repaid.

A further £1m loaned to the troubled fund by the Presbyterian Church is also not likely to be paid back, according to a BBC report.

The £25m from Stormont was part of a £225m UK Government rescuepackageputtogetherafter the fund collapsed in 2008.

Nearly 10,000 Presbyterians lost access to their savings when the Society collapsed in November 2008 after a run on its funds.

A rescue package underwritten by the Westminster government and the Northern Ireland Executive was agreed in 2011.

A note in the Department for the Economy’s accounts says that the “interest-free loan of £25m is unlikely to be recovered”.

Rev Trevor Gribben, Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, said yesterday the church hopes there will be more money for the investors.

“When that court-approved scheme was set up eight years ago, it was designed to ensure that smaller PMS savers, many of whom were vulnerable, would receive almost all of their savings back and the scheme has enabled that to happen,” he told the BBC.

“As a denomination, and recognising that many of our members were greatly affected by the collapse, the Presbyterian Church contributed a loan of £1m to the scheme.

“At the time, the church always recognised that its £1m loan would be the very last repayment to be made, acknowledging that it was more important for savers to receive the remainder of their investment attheendoftheten-yearperiod.

“While we recognise that a substantial proportion of the government loan had to be repaid first, and we are led to believe that it is on course to being repaid, we would hope that there still would be some payments by the end of the wind-up scheme in 2021 to those savers who still have not received all of their investment back,” Rev Gribben added.