Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 3 September 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Peter Fitzgerald:

Yes. Okay, well, maybe just one minute of background: the sale of the Austrian private bank followed on from a strategy of the bank to divest of private banking businesses outside of Ireland and the UK, so there was a trust business in the Isle of Man which was sold in 2006, I think, a private bank in Geneva that was sold around the same time, a fledgling private banking operation in Dubai, which we closed very early on, and I was asked to lead the sale of the private bank in Austria following on from that. That sale process started before the crisis. To your point, we did pause halfway through that process as liquidity issues were hitting the bank to determine if we sell this bank we are also selling, I think, it was either €575 million or €600 million in deposits, so it was considered. I had a discussion with the CEO and the finance director about it. We decided to proceed for three reasons. One was we had ... we were now fully engaged in a sale process and, obviously, stopping the sale of a private bank in particular is quite difficult in that you've got counterparties now actively doing due diligence etc., so we felt that pulling the sale would not just reduce the value significantly then but also any further time that we were to put it on the market. That's number one. Number two, our view was that the deposits at the time were a very small percentage of our overall customer funding business, so if you think about it we may have probably had about €45 billion, I can't remember the number, of total customer deposits then and this was €600 million. I think the third was I don't think we genuinely believed that the liquidity stress that the bank was under would actually result in its total collapse. We believed that we would get through it.

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