Hi Brendan, yes I had looked at the consolidated balance sheet but it didn't detail the maturity of the debt, hence my qualifications.
However I've just spend a bit of time searching for more detailed information and finally came across some useful information [broken link removed].
I wasn't too far off with my guess - less than 5 billion of Anglo's issued debt is long term. The other 17 billion will need to be paid off over the next year or so (typically one year is the shortest corporate debt maturity to be considered "long term").
And, as I said, this is ignoring the complication caused by the likelyhood of a deposit run coming up to the guarantee expiry - certainly for the large retail, commercial and other bank's deposits. Dealing with such a run would make paying back this 17 billion look easy given we're talking about 71 billion in deposits.
These figures suggest an inevitable outcome. I carefully read Lenihan's interviews in the Sunday papers to see if there was the slightest hint that he has some plan to deal with of the reality of this situation and alarmingly I could not detect any awareness. Admittedly such interviews are often as much a PR exercise as they are informational but it was disconcerting that some of his statements made no sense when viewed against the reality Anglo's balance sheet.
This impending 17 billion debt cannot be repaid using equity since this would reduce their tier 1 capital ratio which is already low by international standards and anyway there isn't enough of it (equity) to even cover half of this sum. It will either require further tax-payers injections to cover or else, I'm guessing, they will be allowed to issue further (guaranteed) bonds to repay the existing ones. It The problem is they will only be able to sell bonds which mature before the expiry which means they are only deferring things - not actually reducing the 17 billion due.