‘Legalised mafias’: Kerry councillor slams vulture funds that are ‘destroying our way of live’
The KerrymanA councillor has slammed vulture funds “terrorising” the citizens of County Kerry amid a severe housing crisis.
Councillor Podge Foley labelled the mortgage selling companies as “legalised mafias” and said they were “destroying communities and destroying our way of life”.
A vulture fund is a hedge fund or private equity fund that invests in debt considered to be very risky. They make profit by repackaging it and selling it on to other financial firms for a higher price.
Cllr Foley said he knew someone who had their mortgage sold nine times, with the interest rates on the contract being completely out of their control.
Being international entities, often headquartered in the US, vulture funds are beholden to less regulation and thus when a mortgage ends up in the hands of one of these companies, they can raise the interest rate far above what a recognised bank would do.
“The government are too weak with them, it’s the same with the insurance industry. How many times have they been caught lying and what’s happened to them? Nothing,” said Cllr Foley.
“I want to get rid of any business that comes into the country and bullies our citizens. The devastation these people are causing, there are people losing their homes. We have to put a stop to this.”
Vulture Funds own the loans of an estimated 113,000 mortgage borrowers in Ireland, including 80,000 primary dwellings.
An Oireachtas report in March found that around 7,000 homeowners in Ireland are paying interest rates of at least 8.5% on their mortgages to vulture funds.
When debtors fail to pay their down payments, often at inflated interest rates, the funds owning the debt can threaten or even forcibly evict them.
One of the “dirty tactics” Cllr Foley had seen was the sending of threatening letters around Christmas.
“There’s a list as long as my arm of people who can’t find homes,” he said, “and for this to be going on as well, its just nuts.”
Cllr Foley has himself gone bankrupt before and has been through the repossession of his home.
He said it was “so humiliating and so hard” and thinks that many are too ashamed to speak out when their house is repossessed.
He called on the government to remove the funds from the country and protect vulnerable Irish citizens.
“The government let them into the country…it should be the governments responsibility to get them out and get them out in the same fashion they got out our citizens which is in as quickly as possible,” he said.
“When I went into politics it was to help people at the very bottom, the people who are forgotten about and these people who are in trouble now, there’s no one there to stand up for them.”