Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Cormac McCarthy:

Senator, this goes back to 250% limit that's been discussed and so as part of the capital planning for RBS Group, RBS would maintain minimum capital levels in its various subsidiaries, so it's not comparable with, say AIB or Bank of Ireland, who had the total capital in the public company and so for capital planning reasons, more of our group capital was held in Ulster Bank Limited, which was a Northern Ireland company, than in Ulster Bank Ireland Limited and the regulator had this 250% limit of own funds which you could lend into property. So, what we did was, with the agreement of the regulator, we did risk transfers to house some of that exposure and any of that exposure in excess of 250% was held on the balance sheet of Ulster Bank Limited through risk transfers, and again this was approved and agreed with the regulator and so what happened subsequently was that when the regulator agreed to the 500% limited, we then unwound those risk transfers and took them on the balance sheet of Ulster Bank Ireland Limited, the Republic of Ireland bank, and put additional capital in to support that, so it was largely a group ... RBS Group capital planning exercise.