Two more years to liquidate former Anglo Irish Bank

Former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, Sean Fitzpatrick. Picture: Collins Courts.

The Government is set to incur expenses of roughly €16m due to a two-year extension of the liquidation deadline for the former Anglo Irish Bank.

The bust bank, which was rebranded as Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) in 2011, has been in liquidation since February of 2013.

The two-year extension of the liquidation period means that the process will not now be completed before the end of 2024, the secretary general of the Department of Finance John Hogan said.

The total cost of the liquidation to the taxpayer was €294m as at the end of 2020, Mr Hogan said.

The projected final bill is now projected to be a maximum of €327m, he added. That represents a jump of €14m from the €313m projected as a final figure last December.

Mr Hogan said that Covid-19 has impacted “the current realisable values of the remaining assets” together with the “timely conclusion” of outstanding litigation surrounding other assets.

He said the two-year extension will allow the special liquidators to “achieve the best possible return for the taxpayer”.

The fall of Anglo, once the country’s most-feted property lender, resulted from the liquidity crisis which struck the world’s banks from late 2007 onwards. The cost to the exchequer on the back of an initial €64bn bailout of the country’s banks is estimated at roughly €40bn.

The latest progress update report on the liquidation states that IBRC and the special liquidators, Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson of KPMG, had invoked the bank’s business continuity plan upon the outbreak of Covid-19 in March 2020, with the result that the institution was able to “respond in an efficient and timely manner”.

It said that while there has been “limited disruption” to IBRC’s operations and business as a result of the pandemic, it has nevertheless become necessary to delay bringing the bank’s remaining assets to market in order to maximise their value.

Meanwhile, the IBRC commission of investigation, set up in 2015 to investigate a debt writedown of €119m following the sale of the company Siteserv to billionaire Denis O’Brien, is expected to provide its final report on the matter to the Government at the end of October 2021.

The commission, which has been extended on numerous occasions, has provided nine interim reports to Government to date.