Word: ireland
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...Anglo Irish has been the bank of choice of the wealthy builders and developers who reaped the rewards of Ireland's colossal property boom during the "Celtic Tiger" era of the 1990s. They also tend to support Fianna Fail, the party at the head of Ireland's coalition governments for the past 12 years. Following the FitzPatrick loan scandal, it emerged that 10 Anglo Irish customers, since dubbed the "golden circle" by the Irish media, were lent more than $560 million to buy shares in the bank - a deal that may have broken laws on market abuse. To date, only...
...month on, though, and the joke's looking less funny and more like an accurate prediction. Ireland's banks are edging ever closer to the brink of meltdown, and some analysts say six months looks a little too generous...
...Take Allied Irish Banks. The country's biggest lender revealed this week that its pretax profit dropped 62% in 2008. The bank's share price slid 90% last year. In any other country, worried customers would already be queuing to withdraw all their money. But so far Ireland has avoided a run on its banks, thanks largely to the government's decision in October to guarantee deposits in six Irish banks, as well as those in five foreign institutions, for two years. The Irish guarantee was heralded in some quarters as a model solution for restoring confidence, with several...
...Ireland's downturn has also laid bare some ugly home truths - scandals indicative of a boom-years culture of nepotism and scant regulation that some say is as much to blame for the nation's economic malaise as the global downturn. In December, it emerged that Sean FitzPatrick, the then chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, Ireland's third largest bank, had concealed from shareholders more than $100 million in personal loans by transferring them temporarily to a building society. After FitzPatrick quit, the Irish government stepped in to nationalize Anglo Irish, but the damage to public confidence had already been...
...With local and European elections in June looming, Cowen has the dual task of saving his party at the polls and repairing the damage to Ireland's international reputation. Once the shining economic success story of Europe, the country has been routinely described in recent months as the weak link in the euro zone and even suffered the ignominy of being cited as a potential recipient of aid from Germany last week, alongside other struggling E.U. states like Hungary...