Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 29 July 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Alan Merriman:
No, look, I think, you know, the way I'd articulate and it's the fairest way I can possibly do it is that, yes, EBS was later into development finance than others. Yes, it was competing in a very, very tough market place. Yes, it was having to establish and build relationships. Therefore, you wouldn't ordinarily expect to have the business that would be the best business - for obvious reasons. Developers themselves want to build relationships, they want to have the confidence that somebody is going to be able to bank them etc., etc. However, having said all of that, so it was a tough environment for EBS to build up that business but it was mandated to do it. It was a strategy to do it. Now, best way of being objective in terms of answering your question, let's talk about the discounts that were applied to the books across all the banks that went into NAMA and the subsequent deleveraging that was done. Fergus himself explained that the EBS discount was, I think, 57%. Big picture, that's within the goalposts of the other banks. So objectively, it wasn't any ... it wasn't much worse than others-----
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