Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 22 March 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Proposed Sale of Non-Performing Loans to Private Investment Funds (Vulture Funds): Allied Irish Banks

9:30 am

Mr. Mark Bourke:

Perhaps the best way for us to talk about this is in terms of the plan to which we are committed. We start today having reduced our total non-performing loans of €29 billion to €6.3 billion over a period of four years. Some 95% of that has been done through more than 70,000 individual restructurings. We have a plan which by the end of 2019 will get us down from the current level of €6.3 billion impaired loans to between €3 billion and €4 billion. There is also a number of post-restructured loans which includes €4 billion, which we have said we will not sell and that over time they will come out of their probationary period and will then be classed as re-performing loans. Our task is to get from that €10.1 billion total down to between €3 billion and €4 billion. The majority of that will be done through individual restructurings. We have also said that we need all the tools in our armoury to get to the point where we have a normalised balance sheet. That has implications for our ability to price and to continue to lend. It is important that we have the option because, largely, it is where people have not engaged with us and have consistently refused to engage that we would look at over the two-year period of potential loan sales. We have said that in doing so, the bank will not have private dwelling homes, PDHs, as part of that. We have sufficient momentum in arriving at our target not to consider doing sales of private dwelling homes. It is correct that we are not making any comment about an alleged sale of non-performing exposures now because if one looks at this process, during the period until we finalise, there are huge changes in the numbers, largely because we continue to restructure the individuals. We are not at the point where we have an announceable transaction or one which we would put into the public domain.

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