Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 22 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Yes, Deputy, I dealt with that at the time. When we were compiling information from the institutions during the summer 2009, which was pre-NAMA - the NAMA Act hadn't been passed at that stage, it was purely an information exchange between the banks and myself and my team - we asked the banks what their loan to values were. They typically, as I said earlier, came back and said that their loan-to-value lending was around 70%, except for one institution which said it was lending about 100% loan to value. And we did an estimation that, based on their returns ... that they ... that their average loan-to-value lending at origination was around 77%. Subsequently, when the banks provided the information to us as part - when the NAMA Act was passed, that they were giving us information as part of the loan transfer - and we looked at the valuations of the property and ... then came to our own conclusion was that the loan-to-value ratios were probably closer to 100%, rather than 77%. And therefore that would result for the majority of the increase in the discount from 30% towards mid-50s.