ALAN DUKES, the chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, was the latest banking representative to appear before the Oireachtas finance committee in its wide-ranging probe of banking and economic issues.
Dukes differed from the views of Bank of Ireland chief executive Richie Boucher, who appeared at the committee on Wednesday, on the state of the property market.
Boucher said Dublin house prices had stabilised; Dukes said he could see no substantial evidence to show that the bottom of the market had been reached.
The final cost of Anglo was “highly contingent” on the Irish and British property markets, and the wider Irish economy, he said.
He was “reasonably hopeful” the final cost of the bank to the State would come at €25 billion, well below last year’s €29.3 billion to €34.3 billion range.
Jim Bradley, Anglo’s acting chief financial officer, gave figures showing just how reliant the bank is on central bank funding.
About 98 per cent of Anglo’s €40 billion central bank funding comes from the Central Bank, he said.
As for burning unguaranteed senior bondholders, Dukes kicked for touch.
He said this was the Government’s call and that the bank would “do what we are told”.
Dukes said Anglo, which has responsibility for Irish Nationwide since a merger in July, had received no response to its request to the building society’s former chief executive Michael Fingleton to repay the €1 million bonus he received after the guarantee and to return the €11,500 watch he received when he retired in 2009.
The Anglo chairman said he would “love” if all of the investigations into the bank concluded as they were “quite onerous” on staff and taking up considerable time.
The bank’s staff headcount was down 41 per cent from peak and there would be another 350 redundancies over the start of 2012.
This was “the dark side of bank restructuring”, he said and it was difficult for middle-ranking and junior staff who were working for a bank that had “toxic” constantly applied to it, he said.
Dukes said he found it “rather odd” that the bank had not been invited to take part in discussions with the EU Commission on restructuring plans submitted by it in 2009 and 2010 that were later rejected by Brussels.
Appointed by the Government as a public interest director to Anglo in December 2008, Mr Dukes said he found it “quite appalling” that the bank had “broken through every prudential limit” on lending concentration.
He discovered after joining that the bank did not have internal records to show the full extent of lending to particular companies and borrowers.
He was “amazed by the impenetrability and opacity” of the information available on loans within the bank and that the financial regulator had “put up with that opacity”, he said.
