Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

With regard to the capital injection of €4 billion by the Government, this was to help the bank's capital position to enable it to buy back certain debt instruments at less than their par value and which will help its capital position. This measure is similar to that announced by a number of banks. Details of the buy-back will be finalised in the coming weeks.

The board is finalising a business plan and this will include scaling down the balance sheet, reducing the cost base and reducing risk concentration. The board is also recruiting a new management team to be led by an externally appointed chief executive officer.

I wish to make an important point that the alternative to the Government's decision would have, in my opinion, left the taxpayer open to a far wider potential exposure. We made those decisions because of the need to provide a capital injection to the bank and they are the right decisions. The reason we should do this is to ensure that the financial system in this country is seen to be operational and working.

On the question of loans to directors, a total of €31 million of the total of €4.3 billion impairment charge in the first half-year accounts was attributed to loans for former directors. There have been no write-offs of these loans and the bank will seek full repayment. Two serving directors have loans from Anglo Irish Bank but they are performing fully. The chairman of the bank has confirmed that senior staff have loans from the bank which are now impaired. Anglo Irish Bank will deal with these impaired loans in exactly the same way as any other customer to ensure maximum recovery of these loans. The bank expects that these loans will be repaid in full. Any conflict of interest will be addressed by the bank's internal decision-making process.

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