Anglo : “the timeline is now September as the summer holidays are here”

According to the Irish Times today, Anglo CEO, Mike Aynsley, is blaming the summer holidays for his revised estimate of when the EU will respond to the revised version of the Anglo restructuring plan which was submitted at the end of May 2010, following the lambasting that the EU gave their first effort.

As previously noted on here, it is difficult to see how Anglo can transfer the second tranche of loans to NAMA without getting a further capital injection to shore up the residual losses that will be left behind in Anglo’s books. To recap – the EU has already given approval for a cumulative injection of €14.44bn into Anglo (€4bn approval in 2009 and €10.44bn approval in 2010) and so far the government has pumped €14.3bn into Anglo and the remaining €0.14bn is unlikely to be sufficient to offset the losses on Anglo’s tranche 2 transfer to NAMA (€8bn gross loans at an estimated 55% haircut). NAMA has denied that the delay in transferring Anglo’s tranche 2 is to do with anything other than “the amount of paperwork involved in the process. A spokesman for NAMA said yesterday [19^th July, 2010] said there was no other reason for the delay”.

Unbelievably Mike Aynsley might be right about the folks in Brussels taking a break for a holiday in August – looking at the Financial Services sector decisions at the Competition Commissioner last year reveals there were 8/9 decisions in both July and September 2009 and none in August. However the fact that the Decision didn’t come before the August break probably doesn’t augur well – this was the second restructuring plan after all so Anglo, the DoF and the Commissioner should have been up to speed on the basic issues and context. And meanwhile over at NAMA, what’s happening with Anglo’s second tranche?

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