Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 14 May 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Richard Burrows:
First of all, during that period we were heavily engaged in the implementation of the Basel II regulations, which were the new regulations that required us to have a different approach to assessing the amount of capital required to be appropriately capitalised for the business which we were doing. And in that ... in that calculation, the mortgage loans were actually the least risky under the Basel II methodology, whereas other loans carried various rates. So that would have been the background to a lot of the work which was being done in assessing the comparative risk of different elements of the balance sheet.
If I ... if I go to the second part of your question, we didn't raise fresh capital during the period but of course we were generating capital through the ordinary profit and loss of the ... of the business. That's the way businesses generally do generate capital where your ... you're earning profits after tax, you're paying part of that as dividend to your shareholders and the remainder you're adding to your capital base within the business. So when the profitability of the bank improves, so also does your flow of fresh capital.
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