KeithWalsh

If you would be so kind as to spare us the sermon about “culture change” and giving Irish people a “stake in the markets”. 🔹Under governments you served in and led, many Irish citizens were fundamentally treated as a “convenient cash machine”. 🔹Ulster Bank - the Irish arm of RBS/NatWest, a British bank bailed out by UK taxpayers - ran its Global Restructuring Group operation here. 🔹Viable Irish SMEs were moved into GRG, having been sold swaps fraudulently under the guise of “protection”. 🔹There were complex hidden break costs and undisclosed commissions. No suitability assessments - followed by benchmark rate rigging to trigger LTV breaches; 🔹All to facilitate the parent of Ulster Bank (RBS) to shore up its own balance sheet. 🔹Of more than 2,000 Irish SME connections put through that process, apparently vanishingly few came out intact. 🔹Were there any? And if so why did these yet unknown entities get special treatment? 🔹Loans were then packaged and sold to vulture funds, which is asset-stripping of Irish businesses and the families behind them, permitted on your watch. 🔹At the same time the tracker mortgage scandal - the biggest consumer overcharging episode in the history of the State - unfolded. 🔹Tens of thousands of accounts were denied the tracker rates they were entitled to. 🔹People paid thousands extra every year. Dozens of family homes were lost. Lives were lost. 🔹Ulster Bank, the same bank that gave you your own 40-year 100% tracker, was among those involved. Redress was slow and incomplete. 🔹You called the behaviour “scandalous” in 2017, yet the culture you like to speak of - was a culture of banks overcharging & it persisted, with a captured ineffective regulator watching on. 🔹Research shows that overcharging on standard variable rate mortgages commenced well before the so-called crisis, given the desperate measures required to conceal long running insolvency; 🔹I take some relief in the fact that I contacted you directly in relation to my substantiated protected disclosures from my time on the Banking Inquiry. 🔹When the full truth of what was allowed to happen under your watch - & that of your party colleagues - emerges, you will therefore not have the comfort of plausible deniability. 🔹You are now speaking of an SIA - inviting again unsuspecting parties to come on down and get a “stake in the markets” - the very capital markets that caused the destruction of so much generational wealth across Ireland; 🔹this is ongoing through use of synthetic securitisations - whereby the characteristics of the bilateral contracts taken on by new homeowners - are transformed into something that benefits those same capital markets - invisible & detrimental to these borrowers; 🔹Lecturing the public about household wealth after Irish assets, businesses and family homes were used to repair foreign balance sheets & after years of documented overcharging that is ongoing and unrecognised, is tone-deaf. 🔹Accountability first? Then perhaps talk about “culture change”. Please share. @Wftproof @ArturNadol7566 @stevemiddi1 @BankConfidenti1 @CarshaltonArt @efgbricklayer @PMJAudits @irldefrauded @kenoflynnTD @JMcGuinnessTD @BlowersIreland @Farrell_Mairead @MaryLouMcDonald @alomohan @andyverity @jameshurley