Anglo Irish Bank, which is receiving €22bn of support from the taxpayer, was destined to collapse from the very beginning, according to its new executive team.

"Anglo bet the ranch on one thing and one thing only: commercial real estate. They backed the continuation of something that will never happen: a bull market till the cows come home," said chief executive Mike Aynsley. "There is always going to be adjustments to markets and if you look at what happened with the real estate market, in fact if you look at what happened with a number of sectors in the Irish economy… the bubble was just too great. It just had to burst. It was always going to burst. The impact of that is now being seen."

Chief financial officer Maarten van Eden said "basic banking virtues and disciplines" had been neglected. "If you look at the loan book… you see bad documentation, you see improper claim on the collateral, can you actually get to the collateral if you need to? You see no maturities; you see no defined interest resets depending on market circumstances. All of the sort of things of things that you would normally – if you were a cautious and prudent banker – put into a contract with a customer, you don't see that," he said.

Aynsley said the lack of discipline was part of a "bull market" that the former management didn't expect to end: "They're going from zero to €100bn [of lending] at light speed and all they really care about is writing those loans to lock in a margin against the funding that they subsequently go and chase. 'We've written a billion dollars worth of loans this week, Treasury, go find out how we can fund this'. And then the process was a backfilling process around risk management, finance and how transparent you are about what you do… It's a different environment than what you want to have happen in a stable and robust bank."

They also criticised Anglo's credit committee, which was vaunted during the bubble for the speed with which they approved lending decisions.

"You could say that apart from the impact of what's happened to the marketplace, the credit committee decisions of the past would have certainly had a role to play in the downfall of the bank," Aynsley said.

He said that other banks were suffering because they followed Anglo's lead on commercial property.

"It seems from an outsider coming in that Anglo, AIB, Ulster, Bank of Scotland Ireland all [showed] the same lack of discipline, lack of rigour and just no realisation that the party was eventually going to be over," he said.

"They were all up there putting the credit cards over the bar, having a good time, and unfortunately in the days when this thing had already peaked they were still doing so, they were still popping the corks on the champagne because… a lot of these things don't flow through. You don't see them for a number of months."

Anglo's own investment properties have dropped in value by nearly €300m, the accounts show.