The boss of Belgian bank KBC has dismissed the Central Bank’s crackdown on mortgage overcharging as “annoying” and called on Irish regulators to “turn the page”.

The tone-deaf remarks from KBC Group CEO Johan Thijs came as the lender’s Irish unit set aside another €18m in expectation that a Central Bank fine could soon come for its role in blocking or removing customers from low-interest tracker mortgages a decade ago.

The scandal has years to run in the courts, with hundreds of cases still in dispute or facing appeal among more than 40,000 customers of Ireland’s five largest banks.

The Central Bank says 99 of those customers lost their own homes through overcharging, and 216 more lost their investment properties – but Mr Thijs told analysts in a conference call that the Central Bank should have dispensed with the issue by now.

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“What is still an annoying thing is all the tracker mortgage stuff. Honestly, we would recommend to (the) Central Bank of Ireland: come on, guys, turn the page,” said Mr Thijs.

His comments come as latest figures show property prices have fallen in Dublin for the third month in a row, while nationally prices increased slightly in the last year.

Mr Thijs also described the investigations as a needless drag on business development.

“We’ve learned our lessons. We know what to do. Let’s now stop doing all the nitty-gritty stuff,” he said, suggesting that continued scrutiny was harming banks “and the financial market as a whole in Ireland”.

Mr Thijs’s summary appeared all the more remarkable given that, moments before, he had noted that KBC in Ireland had yet to receive its Central Bank fine.

“The question is how much. This is a big question mark. Nobody knows,” he told analysts.

The Central Bank declined to comment.

However, politicians said KBC itself was to blame for dragging its feet in public accountability and in resisting so many of its customers’ claims.

John McGuinness, the Fianna Fáil chairman of the Oireachtas Finance Committee, said “KBC was reluctant to co-operate with the committee initially” as it probed the extent of lenders’ breaking of tracker mortgage deals.

“They didn’t like being asked by politicians to answer questions,” Mr McGuinness told the Irish Independent.

“KBC should note that the regime in the Central Bank has changed and the Oireachtas Finance Committee is not finished and will see this through.”

Sinn Féin finance spokesman Pearse Doherty said the KBC chief’s remarks “display the worst instincts of the banking industry: pure arrogance, contempt for customers and a profit motive that trumps everything else”.

“We have seen the banks taking the easy option by selling family homes off to vulture funds, and their recent performance in the tracker mortgage scandal,” he said. “These banks are not looking to offer the best deal for their customers, or provide long-term sustainable solutions for their customers.”

Mr Thijs told analysts that KBC’s external auditors asked them to estimate a most likely Central Bank fine. He said that based on the regulator’s only major fine to date – €21m charged in May to Permanent TSB – they had calculated the most likely fine against KBC would be around €14m.

His comments came as KBC Ireland published third-quarter results that – aside from the ring-fencing of €14m to fund the potential fine and €4m more to keep paying compensation to customers – showed strong underlying growth in business here, with its national share of the mortgage market rising to 11.7pc from 10.9pc a year ago.

In response to Irish Independent questions, KBC Ireland said roughly a quarter of the residential loans in its €10bn mortgage book today are trackers charging an average of just 1pc interest.

Tracker loans are so-called because they shadow the movements of the European Central Bank’s own wholesale rates to banks – currently set at zero or lower to try to stimulate sluggish eurozone growth.

The tracker product model was shattered in 2008 when Irish banks’ own financing costs surged amid a global debt crisis that forced most into collapse or nationalisation. Subsequent investigations found that banks, desperate to shed loss-making trackers from their books, took every opportunity to shift customers to higher interest rates.

On Tuesday, Central Bank deputy governor Ed Sibley told a room full of senior bankers that the time had come to reduce interest rates on mortgages to nearer eurozone norms, which currently average 1.5pc.

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