A blazing row has broken out between Irish Life and Permanent (ILP) and stockbrokers Merrion Capital, over a research note issued by Merrion last week which recommended investors sell their shares in the Ireland's 3rd largest bank.
Today Merrion has issued a note admitting two factual errors in the report, and issued a four page research note entitled "corrections and clarifications".
Merrion head of research Rory Gillen says they have made an "inexcusable error", but says the inaccuracies do not change their initial negative assessment of ILP.
The report by Merrion analysts Seamus Murphy and Elaine Brownlee put a "reduce" recommendation on ILP's shares, and suggested new accounting regulations could hit the company's profits.
Meanwhile a spokesman for ILP says Merrion's incurracies were pointed out to Gillen 2 or 3 weeks before publication of the note, but were ignored.
He said these were serious miscalculations which led to Merrion misrepresenting ILP's position.
Its understood ILP senior management believes Merrion has damaged the credibility of its stock broking analysis.
Since the firm was founded in a break-away from NCB stockbrokers, Merrion has drawn wide praise from the media and investor community for producing some of the most challenging and independent research in the close-knit world of Dublin stockbroking.
According to Merrion the two principal errors related to their analysis of "estimateed capital benefit", and the "new Basle II capital accord and IAS".
