Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Mr. John Moran:

That might be open to clarification. We do not introduce parties per se to banks or otherwise; that is not part of our role. We have no involvement in the debt markets whatsoever. Obviously, we would know what would be going on when somebody is buying a piece of property. We understand and realise that they go to the banks to seek their funding. What became very clear – some of this is with the benefit of hindsight – is that personal guarantees became quite common in 2006 and 2007, in particular. What that really meant was that the banks started making their lending decisions based primarily on the apparent net worth of the borrower rather than the real underlying value of the security. That is one of the issues that we have. Those personal guarantees meant that the lending practices started to look away from the actual real estate itself and relied-----

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