By: Michael O’FarrellÂ
Investigations Editor
AN investment fund that controversially bought the financial details of 1,500 struggling homeowners from debt group New Beginning retained the data despite assurances that it had been deleted.
When the Irish Mail on Sunday revealed the data breach last November, New Beginning founder, senior counsel Ross Maguire, reassured clients and the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner that the data had been deleted.
The financial details involved – including names addresses, mortgage arrears, after-tax income and children’s ages – were sold to allow the €2bn Arizun fund prepare a bid to purchase 15,000 non-performing mortgages form Irish banks.
As part of the deal, New Beginning was paid a fee and stood to earn a potential windfall of millions from a commitment that it could earn fees from organising the properties and owners into a mortgage-to-rent scheme proposed by Arizun.
Though the partnership between New Beginning and Arizun has since been discontinued, Mr Maguire, who remains in charge of New Beginning, says he continues to spearhead the fund’s proposed mortgage-to-rent scheme in a personal capacity.
New Beginning reported a data breach to the Data Protection Commissioner the day after the MoS had first raised concerns about the issue and a formal investigation was launched by the commissioner.
At the time, Mr Maguire told the MoS that he had verbally asked the Arizun fund to delete the data – and that he was ‘happy to accept their assurances that the information was deleted without seeking written guarantees’.
Mr Maguire has confirmed that he is a personal friend of the fund’s management team and is a long-time friend of fund director Ray Murphy, with whom he went to school.
New Beginning also wrote to all clients involved to apologise, saying their identifying details had been passed on in error.
Now, however, it has emerged that data protection officials investigating the breach found copies of the data still retained on the systems of Arizun when they inspected the firm’s offices in recent weeks.
The discovery was confirmed in a letter to Billie Pirie by a senior compliance officer of the Data Commissioner’s office this week.
Mr Pirie had complained to the commissioner, saying he felt betrayed by New Beginning because his details had been sold – even though he had not formally become a client of New Beginning.
New Beginning had acquired the details during an initial consultation with Mr Pirie and his family, after which he chose not to engage them.
‘We went to them for help and they went ahead and sold our data to some company God knows where,’ Mr Pirie told the MoS.
This week’s letter from the commissioner’s office reads: ‘Investigation officers visited the office of the third party. During an inspection of the third-party computer systems, the officers found copies of the data sent by New Beginning.
‘The third-party company apologised and explained that they thought they had deleted all copies.’ The letter confirms that the commissioner required Arizun to ‘engage an independent external IT consultancy company to conduct a search of their systems and delete any copies of the data found and that this has now been completed’.
Asked to comment on the fact that Arizun had retained the data despite assurances that it had been deleted, director Ray Murphy said: ‘We received written confirmation from the DPC on April 2 that we have complied with all their requirements. As such, we do not consider it appropriate to comment further.’ Last night Mr Maguire claimed: ‘We note the findings of the data commissioner, which entirely exonerate New Beginning. As we have always said, the data was sent in error, was never used and has been deleted.’
