Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 2 September 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Michael Fingleton:
I regret that when we took the decision to downsize the balance sheet and, in particular, downsize the commercial book, that we didn't get the time to do it because we were turning over our commercial book every three years. I think that's borne out in the due diligence report by KPMG in 19 .... in 2007. And we had matched our wholesale funding, which was between three and five years, to the maturity of those loans. Funny enough ... and that was a comfort to us at the time and it was a big plus. So, therefore, if we had got another year of normal lending or normal markets compared to 2007, Senator, there was the maturity of €5 billion ... there was a book of €5 billion of our loans due to mature in that year, 2008. Therefore, we would have reduced I'd say by, realistically, maybe €3 billion. So, we'd have our book down from €8.5 billion down to €5 billion.
No comments