Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Alan Merriman:

No, and, again, I'll very clearly explain that. EBS, as I said, while it wasn't profit-orientated, EBS needed capital. Without capital, you can't have a building society, you can't have a bank. So EBS had to generate capital. Where does capital come for ... come from? Well, for a building society, it can only come from retained profits, broadly speaking. So, you know, this is somewhat of a contradiction, focus not on profit, but without profit, you can't have capital, and without capital, you can't have lending. So EBS wouldn't have had a scenario where it had enough capital, where I'm sharing with you, as a finance director, that as early as 2006, 2007, my view, well-known around the board, and ... sorry, not just my own personal view, treasury, strategy, finance people would have had the same view ... we didn't have enough capital, we wanted to be improving our capital.

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