Eamon Ryan: Debtors will be pursued

THE Green Party warned 10 years ago that “mad lending” at Anglo Irish Bank would land the country in trouble, Energy Minister Eamon Ryan claimed last night.

The Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources said recent revelations about the bank, which was nationalised last month, were no surprise to the junior coalition party.

“We knew that there was a bank which was heavily indebted or had heavy debts in the property side,” he said. “We did not have the particular customer details but we knew the scale of it,” he added.

However, Labour Party spokesperson on finance Joan Burton said the junior partner in government has no idea of what was going on and accused Fianna Fáil of “crony capitalism”.

She was responding after Mr Ryan told RTÉ’s The Week in Politics: “The Anglo banking model was in my mind the wrong model and we have been saying it for the last 10 years. It is not something that shocked us now. We saw it and called it over the last 10 years, saying consistently — going into the Irish Bankers Federation and saying this is a mad form of lending. Property lending like this is going to get us into trouble; so I knew about it five years ago.”

Mr Ryan insisted that all debts owed to the bank, including sums of e500 million each owed by each of 15 customers will be pursued.

“We are going to chase after every penny. It is the people’s bank now and that debt is owed to us and we will make sure that it is collected,” he said.

“That lending is secured against assets, so if people can’t pay, that is a security that the bank can then go for and actually take that instead of the amount owed. There is a determination to go after every single penny. No one will be given any sort of leeway and that is the right way to do it,” he told RTÉ news.

Mr Ryan said many of those assets are lands around Dublin which are still valuable .

“That is the return that we are going to get in the end for what has been a very sorry and improper history for the last five and 10 years,” he said.

Ms Burton said: “I doubt if at this point in time, the junior party in government even knows that much about what is going on. Ireland is bleeding international credibility in all of the international markets because of the crony capitalism practiced by Fianna Fáil with this group of developers and the bank.”

Fine Gael spokesman on communications Simon Coveney said: “It may be the case that individual ministers may not need to know the detail of the level of potential bad debts in banks. But I think it isextraordinary that coalition partners in government would not know that detail.”