Madam, – Niall Ryan (April 7th) seems to believe that it would be cheaper to appoint a liquidator to Anglo Irish Bank than to pay a CEO and a chairman who, he thinks, does nothing but write letters to newspapers. He clearly has no idea what goes on in what he calls “the silent husk of Anglo Irish Bank”.
Instead of just reading letters to The Irish Times(which take up only a tiny part of the considerable amount of time which I spend on Anglo Irish Bank business), he might read the annual report for 2010. There he would find that the CEO and a staff of more than 1,000 people are fully engaged in ensuring maximum recovery for the Irish taxpayer from the loans made by the bank under a previous management regime during the property boom. The losses so far have been truly appalling, as they have been in the banking sector in general. The principal task of the current management and board of Anglo Irish Bank is to limit the extent of the losses, in the framework of current public policy. In any policy scenario, liquidation of the bank is the most expensive option. A "fire sale" of assets, which is what a liquidation would involve in whatever policy scenario is adopted, would produce a lesser return than a more measured workout process.
Since the nationalisation of the bank, we have achieved a measurable reduction of losses to the tune of over €3 billion by means of liability management exercise together with further, less easily quantifiable reductions in losses by means of a series of other deleveraging measures. We continue to work to achieve further beneficial results of this kind. – Yours, etc,