PTSB set to repay couple €61,000

A couple who brought High Court proceedings against Permanent TSB are to be repaid the €61,000 they were overcharged.

Liam Fitzgerald and Angela Wallace, who are among 1,100 Permanent TSB customers that a Central Bank investigation found were overcharged, had claimed that PTSB demanded they accept its offer of compensation of €6,000 before it would repay the overcharged amount.

The couple, who complied with their mortgage with PTSB, claimed it was “utterly improper and unlawful” for the bank to place such a condition on the repayment of the monies PTSB admitted was due and owing to them. The couple also claimed they were asked to accept a “derisory compensation offer”. Last week, they launched High Court proceedings, seeking various orders against PTSB Plc, including an injunction requiring the lender to discharge its admitted liability in the sum of €61,195.13.

They are also seeking damages for alleged breach of contract, unlawful interference with their economic interests, and punitive and exemplary damages. The matter was briefly mentioned before Mr Justice Robert Haughton, yesterday.

Following talks between the parties, the judge was told by Richard Kean, SC, for the couple, that the action could be adjourned generally, with liberty to reapply to have the proceedings re-entered, if necessary.

Afterwards, Liam Fitzgerald, a solicitor based in Lusk, Co Dublin, said it had been agreed that he and his partner were to be repaid the €61,000 PTSB admitted overcharging them.

The couple are seeking damages against the lender as a result of being overcharged. A spokesperson for the bank said: “The bank’s position has always been that customers can accept the redress and compensation immediately, and still appeal for more compensation through our appeal panels, or take the matter to the Financial Services Ombudsman, or the courts, if they wish.”

The couple, from Lusk, were informed last month that they had been overcharged by more than €61,000 by PTSB, in respect of their mortgage on their current and previous family homes, for a period in excess of six years. Following the Central Bank’s investigation, PTSB, the couple alleged, wrote to them and said it would repay them what was overcharged, but only subject to their acceptance of PTSB’s offer of compensation of €5798.92.

In a sworn statement, Mr Fitzgerald said he and his wife were “extremely and naturally anxious” to receive back the funds. The overcharging, he said, had pressured him and his family to meet the mortgage repayments. His family had to make sacrifices and he had to “beg and borrow sums of money from family members” to maintain his home, which he said had also been affected by pyrite, and to cover the cost of setting up a new business. They had no savings, he said.

None of these difficulties would have been encountered had the couple not been overcharged.