Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 30 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Alan Dukes:

And just to complete the point, it is related to something Senator O'Keeffe raised earlier on. I think - and maybe it's not really useful to say this, but I think it should be said - there is quite a difference between winding down a bank, getting bank into a wind-down position, and liquidating it. If you wind it down, you get to the point where you have satisfied all of the demands of creditors, there is still some base of assets left, there's enough left to deal with the tail risks that are there or else the tail risks are of a magnitude that it's safe to hand over to somebody else without creating a problem. And I think, at the end of the day, that was, if you like, our preference to wind the bank down in that way. As Mike Aynsley has said, from the State financing point of view, other priorities supervened and it became more interesting or more valuable from the State's point of view to liquidate the bank and get the benefit in terms of the easement of the promissory note burden rather than to continue with disposing of the assets.

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