Shareholders and AIB staff cannot complain that the Sunday Tribune did not warn them about the looming nationalisation of AIB. Colm Doherty controversially got the managing director job after other AIB board members and executives launched an intensive PR offensive on his behalf. Ever since, this newspaper had reported with mounting incredulity the bold statements from the bank. Doherty hailed his so-called “self-help” measures of selling off all the profitable bits of the bank. By going along with the nonsense, the government lost another year in cleaning up the balance sheet of the lender. But the numbers, pointedly, from overseas banking analysts clearly told the true story.

In early April, this newspaper’s business section splashed with numbers based on a Barclays Bank analysis in London that AIB faced a huge €3.3bn hole even if it were to sell off its stakes in Poland and M&T Bank in the US and lessen its so-called risk-weighted assets by the disposal of AIB in Britain. The capital shortfall represented three times the bank’s then market value of just over €1bn. At the time, Karl Whelan, the UCD economics professor, looked at the figures and quickly predicted the government would have to take “at least a 75% stake”. There was “a good chance” that the government would fully nationalise the bank later, he said. Whelan concluded that after AIB transferred its loans to Nama, the bank would hold almost zero in capital reserves as it sought to sell all of its operations outside the Republic. Professor John FitzGerald at the Economic and Social Research Institute questioned whether the interests of taxpayers were being served by reducing the bank to a mere 26-county stump. Last week, the markets had their answer and the bank was supposedly worth €510m.