THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund (IMF) has stood over its claim that Ireland will pay a higher price to stabilise its banks than any other developed country despite assertions by the Taoiseach that its figures were unreliable and came from an unpublished draft.
Mr Cowen said the IMF estimated that supporting the banks could cost 13.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) – €24 billion based on Central Bank estimates for GDP this year – was a figure that appeared in a draft report but was not included in the final report.
“I understand there was a figure in an earlier draft which the IMF, in the end, did not use,” he told the Dáil. “These figures should not be relied on as a measure of likely cost for Ireland or any other country . . . though from the point of view of the IMF they may well be of use in calculating financial strains on a global level.”
The IMF said yesterday the figure for Ireland, which had been included when the report was formally published on Tuesday evening on the fund's website and carried on international news wires, was correct. The figure was reported in yesterday's Irish Times.
The IMF spokeswoman told The Irish Timesthat, late on Tuesday after publication, staff had discovered that some figures in the report were out of date – although she stressed that the figure for Ireland was correct. A table showing that stabilising the banks would cost Ireland 13.9 per cent of the country's GDP was replaced.
A new, much shorter table, showed only the relevant figures for the Group of Seven (G7) leading industrialised countries. The figure for the cost to the UK of rescuing its banking system was revised down from 13.4 per cent of GDP to 9.1 per cent.
Mr Cowen told the Dáil: “I understand from media reports that, following contacts with the UK authorities, figures relating to the UK in the final report have also been amended.”
The IMF spokeswoman said she was not aware of any external pressure on the IMF to revise the report, adding the revised figures for some countries were drawn from more recent IMF data.
Mr Cowen said: “Obviously, we are open at all times to discussion with international institutions about technical assumptions they apply to the Irish case.
“But in the current case, we are far from convinced that there is a significant new or additional informational value in the figures presented from a national point of view.”
The Department of Finance disputes the IMF’s calculations, arguing they are based on a “more or less mechanical application of various modelling tools, with a heavy reliance on technical assumptions”. The department says the IMF’s analysis appears to assume the Government’s guarantee of bank deposits will be called upon to some extent, a risk the Government views as negligible.