Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 2 September 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Michael Fingleton:
No, I would disagree. That's a short answer. And I would also disagree, Deputy, with the observations of Nyberg in the saying that lending on land development under the criteria employed by the society in relation to planning ... planning wasn't a risk at all. Planning was well-defined in the UK and here. You knew what planning you would get in relation to loans. You knew, it was established by precedent and all the rest of it. And that was the easy part. The big risk was the construction, and we had disengaged from that almost totally, I think, in the early 2000s. There was little or no risk in land development and that's proven by the fact that we would get our money back in six months or 12 months, whenever the planning came through. We would get our money back and we would have a free run on the construction side financed with another institution, who were very ... I know the institutions involved and they were very anxious to take all the business from us, not just the construction lending.
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