Anglo Irish Bank posted a 47 per cent jump in first-half pretax profit this morning as expected and said it was confident of posting strong full-year results.
Strong lending growth helped push underlying pretax profit in the six months to the end of March to €552 million, in line with the average of analysts' forecasts.
Underlying earnings per share (EPS) rose 45 per cent to 60.6 cents versus the 58.6 cents expected by analysts.
The Republic's third-biggest commercial bank said in March that first half EPS would be close to 40 per cent higher even without one-off profits from the sale of Isle of Man trust activities. Including that gain, pretax profit was €574 million.
The bank said lending to customers jumped by €9.3 billion to €59.2 billion in its fiscal first half, and that as of the end of March it had €9.2 billion worth of lending work in progress.