Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Alan Merriman:

You know, look, I ... and I think Fergus said this himself that, you know, because we were exiting the commercial business shortly after he joined, he wouldn't have had what I might call as granular an understanding of the commercial business as perhaps Brian Healy would have had or, indeed, myself. I mean I'll be very clear that ... and let me explain. First of all, the low risk versus high risk. The commercial business EBS had at that point in time wasn't generating a sufficiently attractive return for the risk that was there. And what I mean by that is that if you have a limited amount of funding to allocate, if you are going to allocate it to a non-member business, so it's not going to your members - you are taking it away from your members to give it somewhere else - you have to ensure you are getting an adequate return. So that was the motivation for looking to move the needle on the risk curve. Fergus's comment, I would say to you very clearly: commercial was built up from 1991. I would say that if you look at the analysis when it was done on the development of ... the development of finance book of €500 million, 70% of that business was done to established developers and builders. So I am clearly and again, just bear in mind the context here ... the total book is €500 million. So, the maximum loan we might have had, and, again, I am not going to remember the exact numbers, but broadly speaking, I think, it would have been €50 million. If you could lend at most €50 million to a single relationship, EBS wasn't going to be in a position that it was going to be banking the Glass Bottle site or Ballsbridge. So clearly, by definition, we were lending our money out in the areas that could accommodate that type of lending.

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