Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 14 May 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Paul Dobey:
Towards the end of our audit in 2009 and there was a dialogue between, I think, Government and AIB, around the concept of a NAMA-type entity. And the working assumption at that time was the discounts may be 20%, a little bit later the working assumption was that they may be as much as 35% and, ultimately, they were 56%. When you go back to the statements that AIB made to the market around the declines in value and they announced that to the market in 2009 based on their stress test, it's not terribly surprising that the NAMA losses were at the level that they were at. Because, as I said earlier, AIB would have planned to hold those loans through the cycle if it could have, but it didn't for reasons we all know and, ultimately, they were disposed of to NAMA at what, with the benefit of hindsight, was the bottom of the cycle.
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