The Central Bank's efforts to lower its exposure to failed lender Anglo Irish Bank continued apace on Thursday as it sold a further €500 million of bonds linked to the 2013 refinancing of the bank's bailout.
The Central Bank received €25 billion of Government bonds in February 2013 under a complex restructuring of promissory notes which had been used by the State during the financial crisis to rescue Anglo Irish, which was subsequently renamed Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC).
IBRC had been using the promissory notes as collateral for emergency funding. However, when the bank was put into liquidation in February 2013, the State replaced those notes with bonds, which it agreed to sell over time.
Cancelled
The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) said on Monday that it acquired the latest €500 million of IBRC-linked bonds from the Central Bank and subsequently cancelled them. This means that the NTMA has acquired and cancelled a total of €7.5 billion of such bonds.
The pace of disposals has also been picking up, with a total of €2 billion sold by the Central Bank so far this year, compared to €3 billion for the whole of last year and €2 billion for the entirety of 2015.
To ease concerns at the European Central Bank at the time of the refinancing of the bailout four years ago, the Central Bank of Ireland had agreed to sell off at least €2.5 billion by the end of 2018. It is well ahead of that schedule.
