Member of the Anglo Irish Bank Ten Speaks to the Independent…Sort of…

Via an intermediary…oh it is all very cloak and dagger…a member of the Anglo Golden 10 speaks to the Irish Independent this morning. This comes as the resignations begin to gather momentum as former board members like Gary McGann and Anne Heraty resign from their other board positions. The member is unidentified except to note;

Before the downfall, he could have been a poster boy for Anglo Irish Bank after their support for his successful developments.

So it could be any one of the fifteen developers customers whose loans take up 10%-20% of the total lending. That narrows it down to the people we expected already. But why talk to them, why now and why under such cover of anonymity?

He used a go-between to speak to the Irish Independent and like the other nine golden Anglo stockholders, he is preparing a strategy to deal with the fallout when his name is made public.

SO the first step in such a strategy would be softening up the ground, ensuring the public know that being a member of the Anglo 10 is nothing like as priveleged as we would believe.

And, he assures friends, he is currently up to date with his interest and capital repayments.

He has never done anything illegal in his life and, since the ‘golden circle’ scandal broke, he is reluctant to answer the phone or the door if he doesn’t know who is calling.

“A golden circle?” quipped the intermediary. “That Anglo share deal was more like a millstone of lead around his (the developer’s) neck.

It is slightly stretching plausability to think that becuase the shares weren’t backed to go up these ten were strong-armed and guilted into doing their patriotic duty. After all, many of the customers felt it was “their bank” and planned to defend its honour like a medieval knight. The bank could be counted on to attend to their needs in such a way as to make share profits irrelevant. It was a cash machine to their concrete pump.

The way that Anglo went about targetting the white knights who would hold the stock after Anglo effectively purchased it from the Quinn holding was a little like putting together the team in Resevoir Dogs.

Piecing together the information from a number of reliable sources, it is clear that senior Anglo executives panicked when they underwrote the cost of the bank’s own shares for trusted customers.

According to sources, a meeting must have been called when they believed Sean Quinn’s overhang would bring down the company if his shares were released on to the market.

Each executive who had a close relationship with a wealthy customer agreed to target their client and put the sweetheart share deal to them.

“Some of these customers had a more intimate relationship with their bankers than their wives,” said a source. “And some of them felt they owed the bank a favour and others might have been deeply in debt to the bank and felt they had no choice.”

Individual members of the ‘golden circle’ were not identified to each other and some of those approached said ‘no’, according to the developer.

We know that, The Sunday Times had more luck ruling out who was in the circle than ruling in.

The Sunday Times has been able to ascertain that the following businessmen, some of whom have had dealings with Anglo, are not among the 10 investors: Sean Mulryan, Patrick Doherty, Sean Dunne, Derek Quinlan, Denis O’Brien, JP McManus, John Magnier, Noel Smyth, Michael Whelan, Jim Mansfield, Richard Barrett, Johnny Ronan and Fintan Drury.

In the end it only took an hour to do up the deal last July to take on th shareholding, so was the breakneck pace with which Anglo had to move to shore up its position and present a better picture to the market-place. Back in April other plans were afoot to land €500m in the bank via a similar sized group, so that plan either fell flat, overlapped or was subsumed by the imperative to sort out the Quinn mess.

Well many of them are now rightly squeezed;

It should have been a so-called sweetheart deal: 75pc of the loans were secured against the shares and the remaining 25pc against personal assets.

But, as the recession bites deeper and the property market slumps, it is not clear how many of the 10 have any substantial wealth left.

The bank believes it will have to write off the remaining €300m it loaned to the 10 investors and, since Anglo has been nationalised, the taxpayer will almost certainly be underwriting the loss.

So you see it is not easy being a member of the Anglo 10, the media at your door, the public baying for blood and your own bank being taken in by the state. Despite the softening of the ground however, I feel as little sympathy now as before. Ignorance has rarely been an acceptable excuse and one feels that in this case it will not suffice either.