Professor Alan Ahearne:

I am not sure it is per sean issue of concentration among certain individuals. One could lend a lot of money to an individual and the loan would be perfectly fine if he or she was able to make the repayment. The question is whether there was genuine collateral behind the loan or whether these developers were completely exposed to the property market without any sort of diversification. What we know now is that the latter scenario was the case and, therefore, the loan losses were colossal. There was not much genuine collateral there and the developers in question had not diversified. The loan-to-value ratios, even on commercial property lending, were extremely high. All of those risky bank practices were in place.