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A NEWSPAPER REPORT has suggested that British taxpayers have bailed out Irish banks to the tune of over €16 billion – with over a fifth of the total British banking bailout bill going to Irish banks.
The Sunday Telegraph reports that the two banks bailed out by the British taxpayer during the banking crisis – the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds TSB – passed on £14 billion of their taxpayer funding to Irish subsidiaries.
The payments, made between 2009 and 2011, relate to the banks’ Irish subsidiaries, Ulster Bank and Bank of Scotland (Ireland) respectively.
The report, by the paper’s economics editor Philip Aldrick, said RBS had paid a total of £7.6 billion (€9.13 billion) to Ulster Bank in capital contributions, in order to safeguard the bank’s capital reserves after writing off billions in impaired loans to Irish borrowers.
Lloyds meanwhile put £6.41 billion (€7.63 billion) into Bank of Scotland in the same period before it ultimately decided to wind down the business. Former BoS loans are now managed by Certus.
The two UK banks between them were bailed out to the tune of £65 billion (€77.4 billion) by the British taxpayer in 2008 and 2009 when the global banking crisis first emerged – with the amount given to Irish subsidiaries making up over 21 per cent of the total.
The amount is separate to the £3.2 billion (€3.8 billion) bilateral loan being offered to Ireland as part of the EU-IMF bailout programme, which also saw Ireland undertake bilateral loans from Sweden and Denmark.
However, the total UK investment in the two banks is still less than the amount invested by the Irish government in six of its own native national lenders, which resulted in all but one – Bank of Ireland – being under majority state ownership.
So far the Irish government has invested €64.1 billion in its own banking sector, taking stakes in Irish banks which in turn have some overseas subsidiaries.
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No mention of the 32% of GDP we spent bailing out private investors based in the UK, Europe and the US?
They, like we, did it to stop a run on the banks. Had we not, everybody would have lost their savings and we’d be unable to borrow.
Not true. Fianna Fail had the opportunity to skip the blanket guarantee but chose not to do so. In the early months of 2008, Fianna Fail were warned by experts of the impending situation and advised against a blanket guarantee. However, Fianna Fail did the opposite (against the advice of the experts). Worse still, they nationalized Anglo Irish Bank in 2009. They also committed to paying un-secured & un-guaranteed bondholders full face value.
There was no such threat of capital flight as you put it – FF could’ve simply guaranteed deposits. Nobody would’ve lost their savings if the correct guarantee was done. However, the Irish people continued to vote for such politicians by electing a similar government in 2011 who is still paying Anglo Irish Bank’s legacy. However, the role model is Iceland whose unemployment rate is now half our rate. The Icelandic economy has made a remarkable comeback. I’m amazed how some still believe the “too big to fail” propaganda by politicians.
Dead Right – this was celand approach – taken from Jeff Neilsons article on Znet .
”What was Iceland’s approach? To do the exact opposite of everything the bankers running our own economies told us to do. The bankers (naturally) told us that we needed to bail out the criminal Big Banks, at taxpayer expense (they were Too Big To Fail). Iceland gave the banksters nothing.
The bankers told us that no amount of suffering (for the Little People) was too great in order to make sure that the Bond Parasites got paid at 100 cents on the dollar. Iceland told the Bond Parasites they would get what was left over, after the people had been taken care of (by their own government).
The bankers told us that our governments could no longer afford the same education, health care and pension systems which our parents had taken for granted. Iceland told the bankers that what the country could no longer afford was to continue to be blood-sucked by the worst financial criminals in the history of our species. Now, after three-plus years of this absolute dichotomy in economic policymaking, a clear picture has emerged (despite the best efforts of the propaganda machine to hide the truth).
In typical fashion, the moment that the Corporate Media is forced to admit that it has been serially misinforming us for the past several years; the Revisionists are immediately deployed to rewrite history, as shown in this Bloomberg Businessweek excerpt:
…the island’s approach to its rescue led to a “surprisingly” strong recovery, the International Monetary Fund’s mission chief to the country said.”
Yet some still resent the English.
Well they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts…
So you would gave preferred they just let them collapse creating greater unemployment and burden on the already streached tax payer.
We already pay nearly 20billion interest on a 30billion bailout to the eu which is fine..?
Yes a banking collapse would have been preferable
No. But you suggested we should be appreciative in some way. I was merely saying they acted out of self interest.
RBS pulled out of Ireland, they didn’t bail anything out, they took a gamble and lost. This is simply paying back debt to other banks so they could keep trading. This is not a bailout of Irish banks, it’s a bailout of an English bank operating in Ireland at a loss. The socialization of corporate debt. To protect German, French and other English banks. It’s lazy and sloppy reporting.
It was BoS who pulled out of Ireland. RBS are still here through Ulster Bank.
Goes some way to making up for 800 years of oppression…..
“State-owned British banks ‘bailed out Irish ones by €16bn”???
More lies.
These conmen should be jailed for their part in destroying our country with their
100%, Interest only,reckless/criminal lending.
their 100 million euro loans to their developer golfing buddies,
not to mention screwing their customers with overinflated knee jerk interest rate rises trying to compensate themselves for their reckless gambling,
whist at the same time pushing their customers/victims into a convenient distressed/arrears/repossession situation.
So as they can shut shop and desert their loyal Irish customers.
All with the support of our bought out stoogeen government.
Criminals.
And there’s a few others mainland European reckless gamblers that should be in a cell.
What about ACC,KBC and Danske???
Snout nosed Schiesters!!
It’s called capitalism , they took the risk and lost , make no mistake they are protecting themselves by supporting their subsidiary it’s not because they like Paddy.
Very good deal for the UK taxpayer… Nowhere else in the world would you get a guaranteed return and security like Irish banks. Even if banks go bankrupt, the Irish government will just take it directly from the Irish taxpayer with absolutely no moral qualms whatsoever.
That’s because there British owned they were bailing out there offshore branches so it would not cause a rebound effect on there own this article is misleading.
I don’t really get the point of the article.
They were just Irish-based subsidiaries of British banks which had jumped head-first into the Irish property bubble with every intention of making huge profits.
They miscalculated, lost their shirts and were bailed out by the UK tax payer.
This is just about British companies receiving tax payers’ money for making really poor risk assessments in very high risk overseas investments. I don’t really see what it has to do with Irish people / Ireland.
Many of these banks were amongst the ‘innovators’ in the Irish property sector too, offering huge amounts of credit and actually played a key role in inflating the bubble.
The UK financial regulators should have been paying a lot more attention to the activities of these UK-owned organisations if the tax payer was ultimately left holding the debts.
And RBS would have expected (and instructed) their management team in the Irish operation to report the same or better results to the local competition.
you put your money down and you take your chances … as we all now know the whole thing was a house of cards and could never have lasted … if irish people have to pay for the mistakes of the banks then so must the british people do the same with their banks ….
And none of these banks went hell for leather creating these stupid 100% mortgages inflating prices further,and when s*it hit the fan pulled out. Tuff s*it me thinks
It is simple uk banks gave the Irish banks loan a big loan so they could pay There loans back to the uk banks then all that debts gets passed on to the Irish tax payer because we took all there debts on
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