Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 27 March 2018

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

Overview of Operations: Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland

2:00 pm

Mr. Nick Ashmore:

It is assessed by the lenders we are working with. That is one of their front-line functions. In the provision of liquidity and the provision of risk sharing, which we did with the credit guarantee scheme, we work with the banks on the basis they always have some skin in the game. They were fully exposed on the first piece and in the agriculture cashflow support loan scheme they still had 20% of the risk. They underwrote those loans and we outsourced that function to them. It was up to them to assess that a business was not in financial difficulty. There are a couple of reasons. Lending into a situation where a business is in financial difficulty will pretty much guarantee the bank will not get the money back. In effect, that situation is more suited to a grant or some other form of financial support that is not contingent in that way. We are very strictly bound by the state aid rules. One of the core tenets of state aid rules is that state aid should not be extended to businesses that are in financial difficulty. What we do focus on is businesses that are vulnerable but viable. We should see the cohort of loans in a guarantee scheme take place at a higher risk level than the banks would ordinarily be happy to take. That is one of the things we facilitated with the Brexit loan scheme. It is one of the things we facilitated with the agriculture scheme. In the agriculture scheme, we did not let the banks take security for those loans. It meant farmers could access them very quickly. It did not encumber their farms and as a result, given the price, it was very popular.

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