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:

We do not have any active intentions at the moment. We set the SBCI up in the full intention for it to be off balance sheet. We structured it in a certain way. We worked with the CSO and EUROSTAT in anticipation of that. In reality, EUROSTAT came in, reviewed the SBCI and concluded at the last stage that we were on balance sheet. However, it did provide us with a letter at the time that said if we diversified our activities in other areas, that is, away from the SBCI lending and if we have other activities in there and we can show we are commercial, it would be happy to have another look at it in a few years' time. It is something that is in the back of our minds. If down the road, it is something that is of real value to the State and the SBCI's operations and we can make a case, in conjunction with the Department of Finance, we might look to do that. At the moment, we are not actively pursuing that because we are really SME-focused. We are also not materially increasing the Government's debt at the moment because we are not adding large amounts of liquidity lending to that process because we have completed the bank exercise at this point.

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