Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 22 November 2016

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

Banking Sector in Ireland: Permanent TSB

2:00 pm

Mr. Jeremy Masding:

There is a context answer that I wish to place on the record and then Shane O'Sullivan can answer the specific question. In each of the cases the Deputy referenced, the disposal of those portfolios was linked to our restructuring plan. The property numbers one sees, therefore, probably would be called connected mortgages as against being the principal mortgage. Essentially, we were obliged to sell some non-core portfolios. Many of those non-core portfolios were in a commercial real estate space or in the professional buy-to-let space, and many of the principal dwelling houses, PDHs, that came with them were connected to that main mortgage. I would not want the Deputy to think there was a proactive vulture fund strategy, as he calls it, vis-à-vis those portfolios. We were obliged to sell those portfolios as part of our restructuring plan, because the primary obligation was linked to a non-core label. That is where we are at in terms of those disposals.