ROYAL Bank
of Scotland (RBS) says it is co-operating with Dutch authorities investigating
the bank's €4.9m purchase of a house from top Irish banker John Hourican in
2009.
Mr
Hourican, a Dubliner, stepped down as head of the UK state-owned bank's global
capital markets arm last month in the wake of the Libor rigging scandal.
He was not
implicated in the interest-rate manipulation but took the fall as the executive
in overall charge of the division of RBS that was involved.
Now it's a
€4.9m sale of Mr Hourican's former home that is being looked at by the Dutch
authorities.
Questions
have been raised in the Netherlands over the true value of the property at the
time when it was sold to his empl-oyer, RBS, in 2009.
Mr Hourican
had bought the former residence of the late Wim Duisenberg, a prominent Dutch
politician and the first head of the European Central Bank, for €4.7m in 2007,
when he was transferred by RBS to work as CFO of ABN Amro, a Dutch bank that
had been bought by his employer.
In 2009,
after the bank had recalled Mr Hourican to London, the home was sold to RBS for
€4.9m.
RBS placed
it on the market soon afterwards for €3.9m and tried to sell the property over
a period of years.
However, it
remained unsold, despite the fact that it's location on Amsterdam's
Diepenbrockstraat, one of the capital's most sought-after and prestigious
residential addresses.
The bank
eventually offloaded it in 2011 for a price that has since been reported as
€3.25m in the Dutch press.
A spokesman
for RBS told the Irish Independent: "We are not prepared to comment, other
than to state that we are respectful of the investigation by the Dutch
authorities and are co-operating fully with it."
Mr Hourican
was not available for comment but his spokesman told this newspaper that he had
lost money on the Dutch property.
"John
bought the house and spent a lot of money on it, including stamp duty and the
cost of refurbishment," said the spokesman.
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