DUBLIN: An elderly woman attempted a citizen’s arrest of Allied Irish Banks Plc directors at a shareholder meeting in Dublin Friday, the latest sign of how much anger towards the nation’s financial sector remains a decade after the economy crashed.
The woman accused the bank of theft over its handling of mortgages that tracked the European Central Bank’s key interest rate, a scandal that has seen policy makers find thousands of cases where borrowers were potentially overcharged.
After taking the stage, the woman said the so-called tracker scandal has caused “enormous physical and psychological damage” to the affected borrowers, and accused the bank of “coercion and grooming of the vulnerable” who were less likely to understand the impact of changing the terms of their mortgage. She was then escorted from the stage.
A spokesman for AIB declined to comment. Bank shareholder meetings in Ireland have seen board members pelted with eggs and grilled by questioners for hours on end in the years since lenders were bailed out to the tune of about 64 billion euros (Dh273 billion). About 21 billion euros of that sum went to AIB.
A week ago, the country’s major banks promised to fix issues related to the tracker mortgages, such as incorrect interest rates. The Irish central bank has so far identified 13,000 accounts impacted by the tracker scandal, and that number is expected to rise.
AIB held the meeting for shareholders to vote on its new holding company as part of European bank-resolution requirements, with the likely approval to be announced later today. The government still holds a 71 per cent stake in the bank.
