British government ‘wants Ireland to buy Ulster Bank’

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT is reportedly considering a plan which would see it ask the Irish Government to buy Ulster Bank, the last remaining major retail bank in Ireland outside of partial state ownership.
Ulster Bank is currently owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group, which itself is majority owned by the British taxpayer following a series of recapitalisations in 2008 and 2009.
While the RBS group has crept toward profitability in the last few years, gradually offering some payback to its public owners, Ulster Bank has continued to be loss-making – recording losses of €195 million in the first quarter of 2013.
http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/ulster-bank-sold-to-ireland-936474-Jun2013/

Click to expand...

Straight from Ripleys believe it or not...sadly for the Brits we are fully stocked up on incompetent loss making Banks.

Hilarious , still we have a history of stupidity when it comes to buying banks , so if anyone wanted to sell a lemon bank surely the irish would be worth a chance

As presented the plan is mad, swap ownership of Ulster Bank for British assets held by NAMA? Ulster Bank following the various RBS recapitalisations is presumably currently solvent and likely to remain so in the near term so may well have some future value but there is still significant risk that loan defaults etc could wipe out that value and make it insolvent and thus yet another burden on the State whereas the NAMA assets in Britain are likely to be much less inherently risky. I’d say writing off some of our debt to the UK for taking on such a risk would be more appropriate.

It could possibly be done however if it was split into probably 3/4 parts i.e. Good Bank ROI, Good Bank NI and Bad Bank(s) ROI/NI. The British can do what they like with the Bad Bank (wind it down themselves or sell to a recovery bank like Certus) and Good Bank NI with no involvement in this by the Irish state. Ireland takes over Good Bank ROI and merges with one of the existing ones (PTSB?). Of course this would probably require massive rationalisation of the merged entity with significant job losses etc so I’d say no Irish politician will want to consider that. They would probably prefer to let the British do the dirty work and just wind Ulster Bank down over time.

Disaster! Talk to anyone in IT - UB is a mess.

The online mobile set-up they had recently malfunctioned too. It stinks on so many levels.