Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. John McDonnell:

I'm not sure it would be something that I could say an auditor would know. It would be a focus of our work to look at whether the, whether an institution gave interest free loans for a number of reasons, and I'll articulate. The first reason is if a loan is issued at an interest-free rate. Then that loan would need to be fair valued under IAS 39, and at day 1, to determine what the actual interest is. So if you issue a loan of €100 at an interest-free rate, in reality what that would be booked at in the accounts would be €95 and then the interest would be accumulated. IFRS always assumes there's an interest in it. Secondly and more importantly, the reason we would look at interest-free loans would be in the context of our requirements to consider related party transactions and there would be a risk that if an institution gave a loan at an interest-free rate that there may be a related party aspect to it. It's not necessarily saying that the loan would not be appropriate, but there would be disclosures that would need to follow from that and our audit would heavily focus in on that.

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