Anglo boss Mike Aynsley is clearly frustrated by the bank's revelation last week that it has to investigate overcharging of accounts.

"It's a frigging distraction. You've got enough problems trying to rightsize the organization and you've got to pull people off doing things so it stresses out an already, in some areas, thin staff, and then because you've rightsized it to things that don't include this, you've got to bring in external consultants that cost you money to sort it out. You've just got the sheer distraction of it, that's one of the frustrating things. You're not left to address today's problems and the future."

It's par for the course for him now, though, and like most things at the mess he inherited, the final cost is still up in the air.

"Because we're investigating it, we need to disclose it. We figured there's probably going to be some questions on how we can quantify this but on a sampling basis we think probably not less than €20m, not more than €100m, most likely €30m-€50m."

As the bubble burst and the reality began to hit home that the joyride was hitting a brick wall, Anglo advanced more credit to developers to keep them afloat. It also bought a number of properties, some of them from clients of the bank.

"It is amazing how long people thought this was just a temporary hiccup," chief financial officer Maarten van Eden said. "This is one of the reasons why I can tell you right now Seánie will never, ever, ever get a Christmas card from me because I don't like the gifts he's left us which is just embedded throughout the culture," Aynsley said.

Worryingly though, "they're still coming out of the woodwork", van Eden added. That said, Aynsley feels they have finally got to grips with the total losses at the bank and believes they can be contained at around €25bn. The post-Nama loan book has been impaired by 54%.

"Absent a further dip in the marketplace we think we've got that about right at this point," he said.

The problem of course is the remaining €20bn loan book going into Nama.

"We've provisioned that to the tune of 38%, so what we're saying is that if the haircut is 60% or 65% it's going to be between €4.4bn and €5.4bn on the remaining €20bn going across. If you add that to the €1.6bn of tranche 2 that gives us €6bn to €7bn at a 60%-65% haircut; if it's a 70% haircut then you add a billion. That's why we're a bit more confident now," he said.

Later he added that "if it's at 60% then that's going to top us out at about €1.5bn-€2bn capital need, that takes you to about €25bn. It's not like you're going to see a €5bn-€10bn hit. The only thing that would drive that is something like the market tanking out there and then of course we get hit and everybody else gets hit too. Nobody's got a crystal ball; absent that I think we're a lot more comfortable now than we've ever been about where we see the end of this."

The good bank/bad bank plan now looks likely to be turned down by Brussels, according to reports, but Aynsley feels the basis for a smaller bank remains there.

"From an overall basis, look at the borrowing cost of Ireland, therefore what our borrowing cost is, and what we've got to charge as a margin. We've got a business underlying where we produce €150m, so we're still running a positive margin," he said. Van Eden described that as "a miracle in itself".

It's clear that both men just want a decision, although they're very clear that taxpayers will be better off if the good bank gets the go-ahead.

"We know we've got a bank that's a recipient of so much state aid that you'd normally want to kill the thing but we know that there are systemic issues around it, both on the liabilities side but also on the asset side that need to be carefully considered," Aynsley said. "We know there's a stub of the bank, having cleaned this thing out, that can produce a financial equation that's more attractive than taking that along with everything else and running that down too. We expect the decision-making process to be pretty thorough. Hopefully it will all happen very soon."

Meanwhile, the delays are hurting the taxpayer. "Markets thrive on what they know. If they have a period of uncertainty, the first thing they do is consider restricting business in that area of uncertainty."