Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Fergus Murphy:

Therefore, the society which was trying to stick to its heritage, which was that of lending money sensibly to people, to members, particularly who are at the beginning of getting on the property life ... of their property life cycle, the property ladder. But they felt that they weren't building enough capital, they weren't making enough revenue to sustain themselves. They weren't able to fund themselves as cheaply as the banks. They weren't accessing the markets as easily and, therefore, they felt they needed new profit pools to subsidise, I think is the word, the underlying business that I just spoke about, which was virtuous and, you know, had a multi-decade successful pattern for them. So by entering into commercial property, they believed this would give them fresh revenues that they could use to build their underlying business. The business ... in fairness to the society, there were limits, there were controls, there was risk management - it turned out it wasn't adequate. But the society kept, to my recall, the commercial property balance sheet to 15% of the total balance sheet and they kept the land and development balance sheet to 3% of the overall balance sheet. But between the two, they still became €1.7 billion of business that unfortunately because the society entered into this marketplace later than the other players with smaller scale ... unfortunately, they at times tended to do business in secondary and tertiary locations, with secondary and tertiary developers and commercial property investors, so they weren't probably getting the better business, maybe none of the business was good, I don't know, but they weren't getting the better business. So that meant that when ... the discussion we were having earlier on again ... when the Grim Reaper came around and when the global and international and local situation became cliff-like, that portfolio started to perform very, very poorly.

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