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What Was Shane Ross at?
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Interesting find by Gavin, an article of Shane Ross‘ which identifies a group getting together to invest €500m in Anglo Irish Bank. One of the members was named as a member of the Anglo ten on Sunday.
A meeting took place in a Dublin hotel recently in which it was decided to buy shares worth up to €500m. Gerry Gannon of Gannon Homes and Sean Quinn are thought to have been targeted to join the consortium. Quinn is already a large shareholder.
Sources close to the group suggest that each member will be asked to put in several million euro. When the fund reaches €500m, it will be leveraged up with borrowings to buy further Anglo shares.
It looks like he knew of plans by a group of the banks biggest customers to buy shares using leverage. It is also interesting that those big customers make up 10%-20% of Anglo’s loan book, so it really was ‘their bank’.
Last night one member told the Sunday Independent: “We are going to teach the brokers and hedge funds that damaged the bank a salutary lesson. It is our bank, it has an entrepreneurial culture. They will come out of this with their fingers burned.”
One can of course only speculate as to what they were at.
But at the very least one can presume that their motivations were no different to those of Quinn, when he dropped a bn in Anglo and Joe Lewis when he got done over in Bear Stearns. These guys presumably thought that they were great punters, but sadly failed to realise how lucky they had been (read “Outliers”). They also presumably shared the comical Irish belief that property and banks were always for buying on the dips…thsi belief would of course have led them to believe that Anglo would never have end up in the state that it is in …and; moreover, that no questions would be getting askjed into their affairs. How horribly wrong they all were, even, if, brazen to the end.
hmmm ‘a salutary less’… I think sabhaircin has it just about right… these guys had no idea what they were getting into, but then why would we expect them to? Geniuses who think they ‘own a bank’… Dear Jesus…
This would be Shane “Eircom” Ross, right?
Whenever I hear Shane Ross’s voice on the radio in these days of perpetual crisis Superman comes to mind. It’s to do with the unearthly speed with which he flits across town from one radio studio to another.
No sooner has one switched away from a discussion of the perfidy of the banking classes and their political cheerleaders on one national station, usually for the good reason that the old head simply cannot take listening to the swell of outraged denunciation any longer – especially Shane’s – and inadvertently alighted on a similar discussion going on elsewhere in yet another national radio studio, he pops up again, usually no more than about two minutes later. How does he do it? Has he taken to wearing his underwear over his pinstripe trousers? Has anyone checked recently?
His underwear is showing for another reason too: a quite different perception of what the Anglo bankers were up to in April last year (according to his by-lined article in the Sunday Indo) and what he apparently thinks of them now. And has his memory become as fleeting as his ubiquitous presence in national radio studios?
Why is this April 2008 article being featured now? Events have overtaken it! Sean Quinn has admitted that greed drove him in this investment and that he lost at least €1bn.
A better use of time and effort is to look forward – how are we going to work our way out of this? What changes do we need to make? How are we going to govern ourselves to limit the scope for excess by the great and the good – in both the public and private sectors?
Donal,
How right you are! Our nation is poised for its forward march with its head firmly screwed 180 degrees backwards, guaranteed to stumble at the first step.
The Opposition have no interest in looking forward because that means having to get off their populist moral high ground and deal with the real issue – where do we get the 12bn euro we need to raise to plug the gap in the public finances?
To what levels can we raise general taxation to meet the requirement? What new taxes must we introduce? Or, should we cut public spending even more severely on the wages side as per the pensions levy or cut out a whole range of public services etc. so as not to wreck the economy entirely by following a punitive taxation model? Have we any new ideas (at least the ICTU have come up with one excellent suggestion – a new Government Bond) that might help bridge the gap netween the unpalatable options we can no longer escape and position us to dig our country out of the financial cesspit it’s currently drowning in? And rescue our international reputation on the way? (Which, by the way, is becoming more focused on the general appalling ineptitude of Irish political response to the crisis than the state of our banks.)
The Government is so shellshocked, stupified or incompetent in the face of such general calamity, or possibly all three at this stage, they don’t know where to look anymore. Or else they’re playing a Shrewd waiting game that will end up as a three year deal with the social partners that everyone will simply have to accept. Let’s hope it’s the latter. But if it is, it’s a gamble and we now know where big gambles can land us.
Ridiculous conspiracy theories, ritual denunciations of Fianna Fail (however well deserved), bony finger pointing, shrill cries for head loppings of bankers and tear jerking balladery about ‘ordinary hardworking families’ etc. are infinitely preferable to facing up to the real issues and having to put your money, so to speak, where your mouth is. Baying for a general election and condemning the government – whilst opposing any measures put forward or suggesting any viable alternatives – is infinitely preferable to dealing with reality. And the reality is that all our main political parties were complicit in creating the problem in the first place.
Brendan Keenan put it succinctly in his Irish Independent column this morning:
“Our banking crisis is probably of the same magnitude as some others. The response of the economy to the global recession is also in the general league. Germany, for instance, is threatened with a 5pc shrinkage — the worst since the post-war “Wirtschaftwunder” economic miracle. What we have is a huge budget hole.
We know who dug it, too. They broke no laws and the gardai will not come calling. In fact, they were re-elected last year. Yes, it was Fianna Fail, ably assisted by the public sector trade unions; and criticised on woefully wrong grounds by the opposition, which wanted lower taxes instead of more spending”
But what the heck! Focusing on trivialities is more fun, when you have neither the capacity nor the courage to do anything else.
Veronica,
We have to recognise that “Jobs are earned, not created” – to quote Laurence Crowley. So we have to work our way out it, without the possibility of a competitive devaluation this time!
When one is short of money, one normally does two things, reduce expenditure and find new sources of funding. As at a personal level, so too with our Government.
A Government Bond is a new source of funding for government. Questions are who will buy it? And at what price? It has to be paid back in full. So buyers will form a view on the capacity to repay. They might also form a view of the possibility of governments inflating their way out of debts. In addition, there is some heavy competition in the bond market at present.
The other issues then are new sources of revenues and jobs. During the 1980s, new internationally oriented businesses grew in Ireland eg. GPA, Ryanair, FEXCO, Aldiscon, Euristixx, Kerry Foods, Avonmore. This is in addition to the Foreign Direct Investment made here and abroad by Irish HQ’d businesses (eg. CRH, Smurfit, the banks).
What do we have to do to grow these kinds of businesses again?
Given that Senator Joe O’Toole’s ATM for benchmarking is saying that it does not have sufficient funds in the account, we come to other sources of revenues for Government. Short of an oil/gas well or two, I cannot see other options for government revenues short of new taxes/charges. IMO, a levy is a tax/charge.
Lastly, the ICTU promoted example of Sweden 10th point suggests – what do we have to do to ensure that we do not get into this kind of serious situation again?
IMO, we did not take any preventative measures after the 1980s bust to avoid/minimise a repeat of the growth of excess by the powerful in this Republic.
I suggest one step – implement the recommendations of the 1970s Kenny Report on controlling the price of building land!
Donal,
Hard to disagree with the points you make. The point is that the 12bn hole has to be plugged someway or other and since we are where we are a social partnership deal is the best process available to us to make a start on it. The Government can make all the hard decisions it likes but it can’t implement those decisions without co-operation from every level of society.
I guess I’m attracted to the idea of the Bond because of the element of social solidarity it implies. Also, whatever money it raises cannot be frittered away on frivilous schemes since it must ultimately show a return to the bondholder, so investment in infrastructure/capital projects with a long term return prospect might be the best bet.
What nobody can predict right now is at what point the economic upturn will begin. There are those who claim that the recession itself plants the seeds of recovery, in terms of accumulating pent up demand for assets such as housing, new cars, consumer goods, replacement white goods etc. that will be unleashed in due course and boost the recovery once it gets underway.
As to how we redesign the rules to prevent a recurrence of excess in whatever new world emerges from this crisis, there I part company with you, because unless we can redesign human nature – and all the political ‘isms’ of the 20th century promised to do that, mostly fatally – greed will always be with us in one form or another.
Veronica,
re. a Government Bond.
There is nothing in a Government Bond that means that the money raised cannot be frittered away. The bond holder only cares about getting paid, not about what the money was spent on. Once the Government issues the bond, it implies both payment of the interest rate (~yield) and the capital on maturity. I fail to see how a government bond, of itself, implies social solidarity. Governments, like the rest of us, can fritter money away regardless of the source from which the money has come or whether it has to be repaid.
Social Solidarity
Social solidarity is a value that exists among people. IMO the Scandanavians have it and express it by paying high income taxes.
We do show signs of it eg. by charitable donations. But influenced as we are by the Anglo-American form of private entreprise and our own conservatism, it is not clear that we have the degree of social solidarity needed to ensure that a Government Bond. Paying taxes is a form of social solidarity. But as we know, groups of people have in the past avoided paying taxes, aided and abetted by a mixture of lax enforcement and
Redesigning Human Nature
I am convinced that we can design institutions to limit the scope for individual and collective excesses/vices.
As an example, i suggest that we limit the damage that anger can cause by subjecting the ownership of guns to licensing and furthermore limiting those to whom such licences are issued.
IMO, controlling the price of building land as proposed by the late Judge Kenny is a means of controlling greed in one aspect of live.
Yet, both anger and greed will continue to exist, as do the virtues that seek to control them. I refuse to throw up my hands and lapse into despair because we humans can be vicious. We can also use our imaginations, skills and resources to limit the scope for our vices to overwhelm us.
We, as citizens of a republic, can on these matters as much as on economic matters. Times of crisis present opportunities for us to re-think how we want to live in society, debate this among ourselves, come to agreements on values and then create/enhance institutions that serve those values.