Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 23 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Donal Forde:

I can. I think you'll see in the documentation that we were given, there's a stress test that was done there on the property and construction portfolio in '07, and that was done by the risk management function in the bank ... by the most qualified people we had in the risk management discipline. And you'll see in that, that their downside scenario, their extreme case scenario, was a loss of €2 million of the bank's capital. Well actually not of the bank's capital ... a loss of €2 million which would substantially erode the profitability of the bank, and might ... might require, I suppose, it's capital adequacy to be boosted. But this was the extreme view, so, when I was asked in '08, I was still leaning on that understanding of our portfolio. That was my view of the risk that attached to the business that I was responsible for. And I answered the question, and anything I would have said would have been informed by that perspective, which I now accept was wrong, but that's what guided those answers at the time.

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