Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Tom Browne:

If I go back to your picture ... your thing ... your page 57, if you look at that, right, okay, you know, where from February '08, 26% went to 42%, right, okay, if you look at, kind of, the comment underneath it - "The percentage increase in exceptions for July is primarily due to lenders applying a 20% discount to security values." Obviously, this is, you know, into 2008, you know, a year after I left the bank and obviously what the bank was doing at that stage, because asset values were under pressure, when the loans were going up for, actually, their annual review, the actual value of security was being written down to reflect the fact that the market was actually ... asset values were actually on a downward spiral. And that's where you've got the increase in that period of time. So, you have to look behind ... there was an individual story behind every exception. And exceptions, you know, on the basis of ... you have your lending policy, right, okay, but if it's an exception to credit policy, it's put up very clearly upfront, right, for a decision to be made whether you would actually want to approve the actual ... the credit, if it's outside policy. And that could be for a whole host of reasons. Like, it could be there's other security that ... cross-secured. There's ... the client could be a depositor of the bank. The client, you know, could be, you know, have another, kind of, relationship with the bank in terms of, actually, on the private banking side. So, there is a whole range of issues that could determine why you would actually, kind of, approve a loan-----

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.