Anglo Irish is hit by fresh loans scandal
EIGHT senior managers at the nationalised Anglo Irish Bank owed the bank a total of €21.9m (£20m) in personal loans as of the end of September last year.
The group of senior figures, who are still with the bank, owed loans ranging from €835,000 to €7.1m, according to leaked internal documents. Just one – outgoing chief risk officer Peter Butler – had admitted taking a loan from the bank as of last night.
Butler conceded that he had taken out a loan worth €861,000 with the bank, but said that he was paying it back appropriately and would not default.
The revelation will be particularly embarrassing for the nationalised bank, given that former chairman Sean Fitzpatrick left last year after failing to disclose €87m in personal loans from shareholders.
Finance director Willie McAteer, who was also forced to step down over the scandal, owed €8m to the bank as of the end of September, a sum not included in the latest figure of €21.9m.
The bank will transfer around €28bn worth of loans at a 30 per cent discount into finance minister Brian Lenihan’s “bad bank”, the National Asset Management Agency (Nama).
But the Irish government is still expected to add to the €3.8bn in capital it has already ploughed into the lender, increasing the pressure on the bank to improve transparency surrounding loans to managers.
The Irish government moved to nationalise the bank after it recorded a €4.1bn loss for the six months to the end of March, the largest half-year loss in Irish corporate history.
Anglo Irish declined to comment on loans yesterday, but is understood to be monitoring lending to managers more closely since last year.