Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Frank Daly:

It would be pretty much the same as Mr. McDonagh. I came probably slightly later to this because Mr. McDonagh had been there since kind of mid-May 2009 at the preliminary stage and the board was appointed in December, so our visibility on this came around kind of December, January. My overwhelming impression looking back on it is the ... I'm trying to find the right word but, what ... where was the business logic in a lot of this lending? And it would be really I suppose, maybe, back to the that table we provided to the committee about the distribution of NAMA debtors. The massive amount of lending to a very small number of people at the top, and then a lot of the what I would call lending on hope value to people at the bottom. A lot of that was related to land which wasn't even zoned, which had hope value more than anything else. And then it was also I think I remember one of our surprises would have been that the banks seemed to have been acting sort of almost in isolation. They didn't really have much interest in what a particular client's exposure was to another bank across the system. There was no doubt, I think, in terms particularly of those to whom most had been lent on an individual basis, there was an emphasis on a kind of relationship lending as much as lending for particular projects that actually seemed feasible.

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