Richie Boucher

Image: Niall Carson/PA Archive/Press Association Images

BANK OF IRELAND has announced pre-tax losses of €950 million for last year which is down on their €2.2 billion losses in 2009.

In their annual report and results published this morning, the bank describe a challenging and difficult year after being hit by the severe economic downturn in Ireland.

The bank lost €2.2 billion over the sale of its property and land development loans to the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) and reports an impairment on its remaining loans of €1.8 billion.

Despite making progress on its main priorities, the bank said it was badly hit by the sovereign debt concerns about Ireland in the latter part of 2010 which led to the bailout package from the EU and IMF.

BOI says that losses on the sale of loans to NAMA were higher than expected at €2.2 billion but says losses on other loans peaked in 2009, and reduced last year.

They expected them to reduce further over 2011 and 2012.

The results pointed to an increase from 2.76 per cent to 4.17 per cent on the number of residential mortgages being more than 90  days behind in repayments.

Reacting to the results on Newstalk’s breakfast programme, the bank’s chief executive Richie Boucher said that 95 per cent of the bank’s mortgage holders are paying their loans and that a total of 9,500 have been re-structured since 2009.

Boucher said that he was very “comfortable and confident” that any tax payer funded cash injections into the bank will be “recovered over a period of time”.

He added that “Bank of Ireland is a good bank” and said that they have “done a huge amount of work to fix the bank”.

Later, speaking on RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland, Boucher appeared to rule out any form of debt forgiveness as was suggested by Allied Irish Banks earlier this week.

He added that the bank was making good progress on its costs over the last two years despite the higher than expected losses on sales of its loans to NAMA.

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