Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Cormac McCarthy:

It's not unusual in large groups and in banking groups to have multiple subsidiaries, so, without wishing to over-complicate it, so, for example, in Ulster Bank we would have had Lombard & Ulster, which would have been the leasing business, that was actually part ... that was one subsidiary. There would have been other subsidiaries put up for a whole variety of reasons and there would be legacy subsidiaries. In fact, one of the things we did after the Ulster Bank and First Active merger was the group had a programme put in place to reduce the number of subsidiaries because once you set up a subsidiary, it's actually very hard to close it down, or deal with it. You end up with trapped capital and dividend issues, so it's not unusual in large groups, and not even ... not just in banking groups, for there to be multiple companies in a group. A lot of those companies would have been dormant.